Distress

Saturday they were prepping Rowan for extubation Sunday morning. Sunday morning I walked in and of course the first words out of the nurse's mouth were "we're not extubating today". Looking at Rowan, I was really comfortable with that decision. He was breathing about 60 times a minute (try it and see if you think that's comfy) even when he was sleeping. The day before he'd been in the 30s and 40s, which is normal for an infant. He looked like he was working much harder.

Also, his blood pressure had been creeping up and up and up.

So we let him rest with a little more help from the vent. 3 days of breathing with the smallest amount of support you can get while intubated is a huge success for Rowan. He's doing much better with breathing today, but his blood pressure is still on the rise.

The doctors checked out his heart and belly just to make sure there wasn't something wrong, but nothing so far! We think he might just be too awake.

Right now, Rowan has two IV lines (one in his arm, one in his leg), a tube down each nostril, a pigtail line to drain chest fluid, and an intubation tube. NONE of these are comfortable. The goal is keep Rowan awake enough to move and groan and use muscles and get stronger, but sedate enough that he isn't in so much pain that he needs extra medicine a lot. This is really difficult to balance. Today the doctors are seeing if the sedation meds need adjusting. They are giving him morphine regularly to see if that helps.

For now, we're just waiting, giving Rowan time to strengthen his breathing muscles and dry up that chest tube fluid (which is still rapidly going down) while we figure out what is up with the blood pressure.