~updated~ Day 17 in the PICU ~updated~

I know... my blog post titles are getting kind of repetitive! Sorry :) this is just a quick post to let you know where we stand this morning. I will try to update after the doctors do rounds.
Ivy had a good night. She struggled with sedation as usual but her most awesome, loving, amazing night nurse Jodi (we have had her before when Ivy was just coming off ECMO and we LOVED her) took very good care of her and got her very comfortable!! 
The respiratory therapist said that they have Ivy weaned all the way down on her ventilator and from the breathing standpoint she is doing positively perfect!!! She has her sats right where they need to be and she is not really using the ventilator that is still in her throat. What does this mean??? It means that she is ready to be extubated!!!! It means that her diaphragm is WORKING!!!!!! 


But....... her lungs look worse today than they did yesterday. She has a lot of pulmonary hypertension. The lungs look very cloudy. She sounds major junky. She needs to cough up a lot of stuff but the surgery she had yesterday is very painful and she is still sore from the chest being opened on the 26th, so coughing is not something she is going to do voluntarily right now. She has a new chest tube from last nights surgery and it is still draining a ton. Not super abnormal but more than what they expected by this morning. Again, not a big deal at this point.
We are waiting to see if anything grows from the phlegm sample they took from Ivy yesterday. Prayers that she does not have pneumonia. 

She looks fabulous this morning. Just a tad bit of swelling and a big owie on her bottom lip. She bit it last night when they were wiping her mouth with the peppermint stick. My nurse was so apologetic and sweet about it. Last night when I was leaving, nurse Jodi came to me and said, ~I want you to know that I am overjoyed that Ivy finally got this surgery and that it went so well tonight, and I am even more overjoyed that I get to be her nurse tonight!! Then she told me this morning when she left that she would be back tonight and that she was going to do whatever she could to have Ivy again. 
~blessed~


Update  4:45pm


Little Miss Cutie Pants is doing good. She has times where she seems very uncomfortable but they are very short lived. She just makes very sad faces and kicks and shakes her head NO


We had an x~ray done just a few minutes ago and her lungs look much better than this morning!!! Much Better!!!!! 


They are giving her a steroid for the swelling in her throat, remember she had to be re~intubated yesterday when she coughed up her tube. So her throat was very swollen and raw. The steroids are relieving that swelling and getting her ready to ex tubate in the morning!!!! Yep yep! You read that right! The ventilator go's bye bye in the morning!! 


Jaime~ She is on diuretics, lots of it!! She will go home with it too. She gets Lasix on a drip and she gets one other in her line. I am going to mention to them during rounds tonight that I notice she is getting less Lasix than she was before, and ask why?
To make things even more similar to Miss E, if her lungs don't continue to look better they will be placing another chest tube. I remember E had her's forever!! And the chest tube that went in last night is draining a TON. It wasn't a huge concern this morning but her output has tripled since then! These Hangzhou girls will need to meet some day!! 


And last, before I close out for the day, her pacemaker! I can feel it! It is very strange... I mean seriously, they showed me the x ray and that was interesting, seeing this box and these wires in my baby girls body right there on the x ray. We need that pacemaker so seeing it didn't really seem odd. But.... feeling it!! I place my hand on her and there is this very hard, metal hard, panel! Right under her skin. She is soooo skinny, maybe some fat will cover it up? I just can't explain how strange it is to feel this hard panel, really strange. But we will find lots of ways to make her feel extra cool about her pacemaker!!