Abby update

Hi all,
I wish I could report some great news today, but no such luck. Abby girl is not bouncing back from the surgery as quickly as we had hoped. We got in this morning to find that she was still on the ventilator. During the night she wasn't tolerating the vent very well so they couldn't go down on the settings. A few have told me they aren't too sure what all this ventilator business is all about so let me try to explain. Basically, Abby is on the ventilator to help her breathe and to "go down on the settings" means that they are reducing how much the ventilator is helping Abby. The docs will only go down on the settings when Abby shows positive signs like a good heart rate and trying to breathe on her own etc. T he goal is to keep going down on the settings of the ventilator until eventually, Abby won't need it anymore. We thought this would be today, but this wasn't the case.

Abby also got some blood today (standard after an operation), which was a good thing because she was looking a little pale. The blood made her pink and a bit more alert but she was still pretty agitated so Jennie, her nurse finally gave her some pain medication that pretty much wiped her out. This is where the big scare came in.

Since she was out like a light, Jennie and I started to move her position to her back. It's important to rotate her from side to side as well as on her back every so often, however she wasn't doing so great on her back today. Since she was so zonked we figured it would be a good time to put her on her back, because she wouldn't notice the difference anyway. Ooops. As soon as we moved her, Abby's heart rate and something else called her SAT level (blood saturation level - how much oxygen that is in her blood) dropped way down. Farther down than we have ever seen. I could tell Jennie was nervous...and she never gets nervous. Kelly ran out to look for a Respiratory Therapist. Meanwhile, Jennie had started to assist Abby's breathing with an oxygen bag that she pumps manually. They call this "bagging." So while Jennie is bagging Abby, we still can't see her chest rise! Oh man...now I'm getting nervous. By this time we had 4 nurses helping out, 2 respiratory therapists and one of the doctors came running in. Thankfully, soon after the bagging began, her chest started moving again and her heart rate came back up as well as her SAT's. So what happened? Why wasn’t the air getting into her lungs? Well...it was explained to us that she "clamped down." Great! Another term we need to figure out. What does clamping down mean? No idea. But I'll give it a shot (if one of you nurses out there is reading this, feel free to chime in on the comments section to clarify this). Basically, Abby closed off her airways. She got so perturbed that the passageways to her lungs literally clamped down. This could mean a number of things. It could mean that Abby is just not feeling well from the surgery, it could be that she’s irritated from the ventilator tube down her throat, or it could be a sign that she has some sort of infection.

This happened once more around 10PM tonight right before we were going to leave. We called at midnight and she was doing fine. They did increase the amount of breaths she was getting on the ventilator from 18 to 20 per minute, and they also increased the amount of pressure that those breaths were being pushed into her lungs. Remember, we want to be going down on the settings, not up, so this was a bummer but hey, as long as she is doing okay and the settings are considered super high, I’m okay.

So for now it’s a waiting game. They will run blood tests to see if Abby is coming down with anything and they will monitor her closely to see how she does on the ventilator. Our prayer and hope is that this clamping down business isn’t more than Abby just being upset from the surgery and the ventilator tube.

I don't have any new pictures of her after her surgery but here's one just for fun. By the way, I'd like to publically thank Clint and Kelly Helton for their help on this blog site. The collage is fantastic! Thanks you two.