A fright and a treat!

Pin It

It was a rocky start for Ivy today. 

She is not going to allow hurricane Sandy to steal all the attention around here!!!! We have been trying to wake the little pumpkin but you see, trying to wake her is like trying to get full without eating! It's a very fine line. She needs soooo much sedation to be fairly still therefore she still needs vent support. But if they let her get all squirmy, she gets agitated. She panics when she feels the vent breathing for her and this causes all her sats to go wild! That just haven't been able to come up with a happy medium yet. 

Then, we had a huge scare! And I mean huge!

Ivy's blood pressure dropped in to the TEENs, she stopped breathing, and she turned the color of used charcoal. I'm pretty calm about almost all the medical stuff, and I had to run to the bench behind her bed! I had never seen her looking like this before and it was a lot to take in!

I knew right away something was wrong.

I was holding her hand and rubbing her leg as she wiggled and stretched. She was still completely asleep. The nurse had just put her stomach medicine in her line and I noticed she got perfectly still all of a sudden.   I asked her if she paralyzed her again. She said no, that was her stomach medicine. 

I continued to watch her, we both did. She got stiffer and turned dark gray. Her blood pressure was 19, 18, 15, 13....

Before I even noticed, her nurse had pulled the phone from her pocket and made the emergency call. These nurses and doctors are so FAST! She made the call and I don't think I blinked twice and there were 3 doctors and several other medical staff around her bed. I have no idea where they came from! I guess since they were still doing rounds, the timing was right. Anyway, they put something in her line (calcium mag I think) and all waited. They said when you have 13 pumps pumping meds in you at all times, you can get an air bubble in the line and all her meds were collecting behind the bubble.  When the nurse flushed, and gave the stomach meds, it must have moved the bubble through and she got all that had collected at once. Morphine, Adevan, Versed, Ketemine.... all sedative type meds. This nurse is beside Ivy her entire 12 hr shift, she is really thorough and detail oriented. I was told by the floor doctor that this happens all the time, you just don't usually have it happen with a bunch of sedatives. And Ivy is quite small so it shook her up. 

And it sure shook me up!!! 

But she is fine now.

In fact the horror story ends with a huge treat!!! 
They just did an echo and Ivy's Mitral Valve Regurgitation looks far better than they had even expected! 
It looks so good they are going to try again to wean her and this time not worry so much about her LA pressure getting a little high as we wean. They can be sure now that is is caused by agitation and will go away as soon as she is off the ventilator! 

So we are coming off the morphine and versed and then we'll spend the rest of the day slowly coming down off the ventilator! 

Our Rock Star needs a break now!! Goodness! She just amazes me!

Pin It