Ella continues to do well, but it takes very little to upset her. When she starts to wake up, she fights the oscillating ventilator which causes her stats to drop. The staff is watching her closely and trying to minimize these swings, only using paralytics and morphine when necessary. For this reason, we don’t want to disturb her for now so our time with her tonight was mostly made up of watching her sleep and trying to be quiet.

She did decide to show us a little drama by fussing a bit which brought her stats down, but nurse Kate and the respiratory therapist were on top of it.

We wanted to leave by 10:30pm tonight, but we hoped to see her stats push up to 100 again. We waited….and Ella didn’t disappoint. By 10:25pm she was pegging her saturations again =).

Please pray for her to be calm and for a good nights rest.

Sleep well tonight my baby girl…sleep well.

If you haven’t caught up from yesterday’s posts (morning and evening), you will want to do that!

We checked on Ella this morning. She had a good night – – when she is sleeping and calm, her stats are great. Every once in while, she gets alert and has a temper tantrum and tries to “fight” the ventilator (she had one at 3:30am and one at 10am this morning). When she gets fussy, all of her stats drop WAY down.

The nursing staff is going to try and monitor these episodes and Dr. Kays has given the orders to use a sedation medicine as needed. They would prefer to not have to give her any additional meds, but her episodes can set her back quite a bit and in the moment, they need a way to have her calm down so she can breathe!

They took a blood gas test this morning, and her carbon dioxide was at 45 (that is good but we would like to see it under 40). Her blood saturation level is staying around 99 (Dr. Kays would like to see it pegged at 100). We will see if the sedation medications help her to remain calm throughout the day and if her blood gases remain constant.

Please continue to pray that she can stabilize and remain strong!!! This is literally a wait-and-see game, to see how Ella will respond to all of these new changes.

Thanks again for the prayers and support.

P.S. Today is Ella’s original due date, but she and God had other plans. =)

UPDATE (2:30pm EST): Dr. Kays just called with some good news. Ella is doing what we hoped and prayed for – – making progress in a positive direction. Although the steps are tiny, they are going the right way! Her pO2 levels are 130 today and yesterday they were less than half that number! Her biliruben count is making progress downward and her carbon dioxide is in range. She is still fussing more than they would like, but they have been able to manage this with some sedation.

Before she was removed from ECMO, Dr. Kays scheduled her surgery for Friday (tomorrow). But with her improvement today, he has rescheduled it for Monday at 8am. Obviously, this is can change at any moment, based on Ella’s stats. And he is prepared to do surgery over the weekend, if need be. But for now, our baby girl is doing well.

Go Ella, Go Ella, No ECMO, No ECMO!

Praise you Jesus! Thank you all for your continued prayers! May she continue to take baby steps forward. Amen.