Cora - Day 7 Updates

Well, day 7 brought a little progress, I think? The morning started off with her sats being low, even on oxygen (hovering right around 90), so I didn't have much hope for the day. Because they were lower, they hadn't tried to wean her off the oxygen all throughout the night and early in the morning.
However, once she really woke up and started being attentive and looking around, her sats rose a lot so they ended up turning off her oxygen around 10:40AM to give it another try.

Typically, she starts to fall pretty quickly (often within 30 seconds), sometimes lasts about 5 minutes, and on two occasions has lasted 20-30 minutes before they needed to turn it back on.

Well, today, she started off really strong and held her own in the mid-90s which was a change. Even more surprising was that she made it an hour and remained there! She then got hungry, and I was a bit scared to nurse her since I knew that her sats would probably fall a bit. (The 2 criteria she has to meet before going home are being able to feed and take a long nap without de-sating and keep her O2 above 88, which is still low, but is the minimum that she needs to be to be released). Well, she surprised me and stayed strong the entire time I nursed her (around 93-96). I started getting pretty excited at that point.

Around the 2.5 hour mark, she was still pretty strong and hovering in the low 90s. After that, she was tired, so we attempted a nap. She almost immediately fell to 88 and stayed there for a bit, but then started de-sating to 80-82 and taking a long time to jump back up. They observed her like this for about another hour to see if she'd turn it around, but she wasn't quite ready and ended up back on oxygen.

The doctor let us know this morning that they were a bit concerned that it was taking her so long to get off of oxygen - especially since it was such a small amount. So, they wanted to try things a bit differently today if she couldn't stay off of her oxygen. They first sent her for a chest x-ray to rule out other issues (pneumonia, etc.) and more specifically, look for areas of her lungs that were sort of sitting dormant and not being used - which would explain why she was still needing a bit of oxygen. The x-ray didn't show anything, but they still think she's just not using all of her lungs after being sick so they have turned her oxygen WAY up (10x more) to help force her to take bigger, deeper breaths using all of her lungs. The hope is that we will do this all afternoon and night today and be able to try weaning tomorrow with more success.

So, hopefully this will be just the treatment she needed to overcome her need for a bit of oxygen. I'm really hopeful that we will be successful tomorrow with weaning since she made it so long today without being on oxygen (about 3.5 hours - although the last 1 hour was pretty rocky) and is getting this 'treatment' today/tonight.

So, hopefully my update for Day 8 will be that it worked and we're heading home. I hope, I hope, I hope!

**Edit: Our nurse just came in (she's my favorite night nurse- yay!) and let us know that we actually are going to try to wean her again tonight. Fingers crossed!

After bath last night (look at her fuzzy hair!) and cuddling with the lamb her big brother sent to her. It's his lamb from when he had RSV and was in the hospital. He was very excited about having us bring it to her. :)

My alert little lady keeping an eye on everything tonight. 

And this is what I spend 90% of my day staring at.