My Birthday

Yesterday was a good birthday for me. A friend of ours from Adventist Health came over in the morning and brought such a wonderful supply of goodies, so sweet! My mom took us out to a nice lunch followed by Haagen Dazs for dessert. Overall it was a good day.

The best part of the day for me was the improvements Caden made. Saturday night they stopped his paralytic medication but it took almost 24 hours for that to start to work it's way out of his body. So it was Sunday night before he started to move or wake up. But it was so nice to see him start to wiggle his toes, feet, legs, hands and face. He would even try to open his eyes when we talked to him. But as the paralytic wore off, they were giving him more morphine in order to make sure he wasn't in pain. It was great to see some more movement from him after days of him being paralyzed.

Sunday evening they took him off the epinephrin which he had been on since he coded on Wednesday. It was just to help give his heart the additional squeeze that it needed. But he was doing so well, they had been weaning him off of it all day and he tolerated it quite well. So, once he was completely off of it, he had done okay. And throughout the day, they had been lowering the rates and amount of oxygen he received from the ventilator. Of course they continue to do blood-gas levels to make sure all the numbers still looked good. When we left later in the evening, they were pretty happy with how he was doing. The doctor told us it was possible that either Monday or Tuesday the cardiac surgeons might decide to take out the tube draining the abdomen or one of the chest tubes. He said the output from the tubes was so small that they didn't seem to be needed much anymore. And, once that happens they become more of an infection risk so they can think about taking them out. But it is the surgery team that makes the decision when those come out.

We are so happy for Caden's progress yesterday. He was tolerating many small changes to various medications and ventilator settings which is great! We are so grateful for the baby steps forward. That is all we are asking for right now. We will see what the doctors have to say tomorrow, but for now, everything looks pretty good.