Home of the Four Trans

The last couple days have been fairly calm. Not much has changed besides having his meds slowly reduced. The docs have been talking about extubation, but because of what happened on Monday, I didn’t want to get too excited just yet. During rounds this morning they again discussed extubation, however, today they all agreed it was the right time. A rush of mixed emotions quickly hit me realizing that this was the biggest milestone since he had his surgery. Probably noticing my nervousness, the nurse quickly assured me that everything would be fine and the process is quick and painless.

The respiratory therapist proceeded to remove the tube running from his nose and just like that he was breathing 100% on his own. It was a great feeling, but I told myself not to get too happy because there was still a chance we would need to get re-intubated. A few hours goes by and he’s still breathing on his own, but he was taking lots of small breaths instead of fewer deeper breaths. To help him take deeper breaths he was put on a Vapotherm machine that sends pressurized warm oxygen through the nostril. Justin is taking much stronger breaths now and his blood gas results are steadily improving. He should be on the Vapotherm machine for no more than a day.

Justin’s mommy will be joining us tomorrow for what should turn out to be a relatively calm day. I don’t expect much changes tomorrow besides maybe eliminating a couple of his meds as well as removing the central line that was put in his belly button at birth. He’s scheduled to have an upper gastrointestinal exam on Monday to check if he has a mal-rotated intestine due to being heterotaxy. If all goes well he should be feeding by bottle by either Monday or Tuesday. We’ve been warned that feeding is usually the longest phase in the recovery process because one, kids usually forget how to suck and two, they get tired fairly easily. Hopefully the sucking should be a non-issue because he’s using a pacifier just fine.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 18th, 2007 at 11:30 am and is filed under Justin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.