Aug
23
    
Posted (jooosh) in All Posts on August-23-2008

I got home from work around 1am this morning. Tina was already asleep, and I was tasked with checking the temperature in Ella’s room and changing her diaper.

When I entered the room I was a little bummed at what I saw. Ella’s heart rate was at 135 on 2 liters of O2 and she was in a deep sleep. This is higher than we’ve seen during the last few nights.

She started coughing around 5am this morning and when I went to check on her she was real congested. Her humidifier had run out during the night, and so had the water in her oxygen concentrator. Now that she’s been on 2 liters of O2, the distilled water in her concentrator evaporates a lot quicker. Instilling the moisture back in the air helped a little with Ella’s congestion, but she was having a hard time getting comfortable. Plus, her heart rate was even higher than it was earlier, jumping around the 170 mark.

She tossed and turned for a couple more hours, then Tina got up with her around 7:30am. Ella woke up retching, was still pretty congested, and was also more fussy than normal. Tina brought her downstairs and after hooking up her pulse oximeter the numbers confirmed what we already knew…Ella’s going the wrong direction.

While still on 2 liters of O2 she was saturating between 96-98 and she was looking kind of dusky. Her heart rate was real high too, between 175 and 185 while just lying there.

This was more than we are comfortable with because there’s not much headroom above 2 liters of oxygen.

Tina called the pediatrician and he agreed that her excessive weight gain plus her current numbers were indicative of pulmonary edema. He recommended we head in to the ER….and that’s where we find ourselves now. As you can see above, the Bun and Mom are still trying to have a good tim espite the circumstances.

We’ve been in the ER for almost 5 hours. They tried to get an IV again with no success. Ella’s was wiped out from the experience (lots of crying) so she’s zonked out next to me.

We’ll update again when we know more.

UPDATE 11:00PM MST – by Josh
We’re up in our room in the hospital and Ella is sleeping soundly.

It took three more tries before they were able to place an IV. They didn’t get it the second to last time because Ella overpowered one of the nurses and moved her foot right when the catheter was being set and it pulled out. They then had to find another vein in her foot. I held her down the next time and they got it. MAN THE BUN IS A FIGHTER!!! Not that I didn’t know this but it took all I had to keep her still!

The Lasix is on board now and we’re hoping to see some of this fluid come off. Tina and I will both be spending the night in the hospital with plans to be in our own bed tomorrow night. Hopefully Ella has the same plans :-).

Please pray that the Lasix will do the trick and that we can find the right balance of meds to stabilize Ella moving forward.

Thanks for all the love and support.