The gray breaths are the one’s she’s taking on her own. Her body gets to choose if she takes them or not. If she doesn’t take them then the venilator will do it for her. She’s still really sedated and not waking up much. We hate to see her have any pain so we’re glad that they’re taking such great care of her pain.
8:00am – Tough night… Gracie had a rough night. At 2:30am she had respiratory distress and they had to suction thick fluid from her lungs and mouth. She has one lung that is still having issues and they are trying to figure out why. They also found a lot of fluid built up around her kidneys.
Here we go again.
9:00am – They are going to continue suction every hour or so and they turned up her ventilator to help with her lung that keeps wanting to collapse.
She’s doing ok though. She’s just taking her time, but we will get there. These are all things that they see often and the know how to deal with it. Grateful for smart doctors and diligent nurses.
8:00pm – Today was a pretty good day. Grace was sedated most of the day, but woke up and looked around a few times. She is still having trouble with her right lung and with fluid gathering throughout her body. They gave her a new diuretic that works a little different than what she has been on hoping it will help her pee more to git rid of some of the swelling. They are also doing suction of her lungs every few hours. It sounds worse than it is. They use a manual ventilator and pump air into her lungs to break up some of the fluid and then through the tube that is already there, they suck what they can back out. It should help her right lung expand as well. They did a breathing test for an hour and she did ok, but still not ready to come off the ventilator. The doctors are encouraged with where she is at. Even though there are bumps, they say that everything they are seeing they have seen many times and that Gracie is doing good. She’s just a little slower. We are choosing to focus on all of the positive things like seeing her open her eyes and look at us, she is slowly coming off some of her medications and she is super cute (even with all the junk hooked up). We believe she is here to effect change in many peoples’ lives and were seeing her do it already. We are so grateful to have this beautiful girl as part of our family.
#gogracie
5/7/2016