March 19: Back on the Cannula

We have a winner from the survey! Thank you to everyone who played along. It was fun to see the votes come in. In the end, Picture #2 won by 5 votes, so we have a new banner picture above. :)

Ethan's high respiratory rate woes have still not been resolved. I was able to have a small chat with our attending doctor today, Dr Kahn. She does not seem overly worried, although it's frustrating for us. We just want to keep progressing. I guess this is what they were talking about when they said 2 steps forward, one step back.

Some steps to help resolve the issue are in affect. He is back on the cannula until further notice. It may be that the avioli in his lungs may have constricted. The way Dr Khan explained it was that he has spent his little life getting breathing support. This has helped the avioli to stay open although his lungs are premature. He might have been weaned too early and because of this, the avioli were shrinking without the extra help. He may just need help to keep them open for awhile longer. This explanation was helpful to me and made sense. At least it was something. They are not sure this is the case, of course, and are just taking precautions.

The second thing they did was give him lasix, which is a diuretic. This dehydrated him and made him pee a lot, with the end result being that if there was any wetness in his lungs, it would dry them out. Because of the lasix, he lost water weight. UGH!! This was a tough one as the elusive 4lb mark has been hanging over our heads for a week now. I thought he would have hit it by now but instead we went backwards. I know it's temporary and I'm trying not to be disappointed, but it's really hard. Hopefully one of the two above things will bring about a solution to all of this. If not, they have other things they can look at. I won't go into those now as hopefully we won't have to go down that road.

So, we go into the weekend without meeting my personal set goals. They will slip to next week. Without him being moved into an open crib, there is no bath time. And we can't feed him by bottle until his resp. rate goes down for fear he may choke. We'll get there. The one good thing is that his whole experience is teaching me patience. Never been one of my strong suits, but I have no choice now.

On a positive note, (as I probably sound pretty down above and that is not completely the case), the nurses have shown me how to take Ethan in and out of his isolette, so I can move him around as much as I want without waiting for a nurse. We are spending a lot more holding time because of it and it gives an added amount of flexibility. Auntie Shell gets to hold him almost every day, which is fun. And he is up to 33 ml in his feeds as his 'full feed' has gone up again due to his age/size. He's tolerating the increases really well.