Saturday, February 7

Overnight, Caden's blood pressure steadily began rising. By this afternoon, they had decided to give him some medication to lower it. Based on how he responded, they would decide if they would give it to him regularly or not. If they start regular doses, it is probably something he is going to end up being on for a couple months, even after discharge.

They lowered his oxygen rate to 30% and reduced the flow to 1 liter (down from 2 liters). He seemed to be handling that fine. So, they were planning on dropping it again later with the hope of weaning him off soon. His feedings had been going well. He was up to 17 mls/hour through the tube. However, he threw up some late morning, so they discontinued his feeds for a little while. When they started him back up, they put him back down to 15 mls/hour to see how he would tolerate that. So far, that was still going okay.

He has very few lines left. He still has a central line and an arterial line. The arterial line is starting to leak quite a bit, but they don't like to change the dressings or remove it before he's completely off the oxygen because they use it to pull the blood-gas easily. Once the arterial line is gone, they will have to poke him every time they needed to draw blood.

Caden's voice still hasn't come back. We've been asking the doctors about it, but they kept saying it was normal and not to worry about it. But this morning one of the nurse practitioners told me they were “very concerned” about his voice not being back yet. It's hard for me to know what is normal or not. But the fact that they had extubated and re-intubated last week certainly seems like it would have caused more trauma to the vocal chords. And, because he coded and they had to do CPR, it meant he had a lot more compressions on that area as well which could be contributing to it. Today, when he tried to cry, we could hear little noises, not much of a squeak, but more than yesterday. And, we can hear him when he coughs. So, hopefully his vocal chords will recover and he will be able to speak normally.

As the attending physician told Greg this morning, “the big picture” looks really good. It's just a matter of fine-tuning little things with Caden in order to get him well enough to move him out of CVICU and eventually home. Who knows how long that will take.