12/7/09

I know I've never seen this many hits on the blog in a day, let alone 8 hours. (That's as far back as I can see.) Crazy.

Ok, today JW has done well on ECMO. His lungs are very sick. On x-ray his left side is completely whited out and the right side I think the middle and bottom are white. He's not really moving air through the left one. It could just be the infection, or there may be some mucus plugging it up. If his lungs don't start looking better by tomorrow they will do a brochoscopy and see if there is a plug they can remove, or if it's just the infection. If there is something blocking the lung they will send if off to be cultured and check for bacteria. If not, it just means it's the virus. The risk to doing the bronchoscopy is that he's on blood thinner while on ECMO so there's the potential for bleeding. So they don't want to do the bronch unless it's absolutely necessary. He's satting well on ECMO and how long he's on it depends on how long it takes him to fight off the infection in his lungs. Docs are estimating a week, but it's really up to JW.

They've added an antifungal med to his antibiotics, paralytics and sedatives. Those are all going in to his central line. The blood thinner is being run into his blood through ECMO. They are trying to remove some excess fluid from his body through ECMO as well. It sounds like once they remove some of the fluid they will start him on TPN (total parental nutrition). I haven't heard a straight answer on whether they will be giving him lipids as well. There seem to be 2 trains of thought on that. Of course, when he's ready there quite the stash of breastmilk building up in the freezer to be fed through his NG tube. What else? He received blood and plasma today. Running his blood through the machine actually causes it to break down so more transfusions are expected. He's oozing a little around his arterial line because of the blood thinner, so that is another reason for the transfusion.

I realize this update is kind of all over the place, there has been a lot of info coming at me and I'm too tired to organize this better. Sorry.

The biggest thing to pray for right now is his lungs. It always comes back to his lungs it seems. He really needs to fight off this nasty infection and start circulating air again.