July 15th, 2007

I'm hoping that we are now starting on the up side of this roller coaster. Megan had a pretty good night last night. Her blood gas was much better this morning and she is taking her feedings with no problems. She is still have normal dirty diapers and is doing pretty well.

She will be having another chest x ray this morning, so I am VERY anxious to hear the results. The nurse said it should be sometime before 10am, so I told her I would call around 10:30am.

I am now pretty certain that she got this lung infection from when she pulled out her ventilator the other day and they had to reintubate her. (thanks to Kristin for thinking of that!) That was then she had stopped her steady decline off the ventilator. We'll see after the chest x ray how it is clearing up.

Megan got her chest xray done. She still has some mucus in the top lobe of her right lung. The nurse said that it is good that it has not gotten worse and they will be working today to clear up the rest of that mucus. She is taking her antibiotics well and is still doing well with her feedings.

The nurse did have her ventilator down to 29 which is great, but she said Megan was "drifting". That is when her stats would be great for a few minutes and then her machine would beep. The nurse just increased her oxygen to 40. She said today they will just meet Megan's needs as the antibiotics do their thing. Bob and I are going over shortly to see her. She will be on the antibiotics for 7 days, so we will be patient to recover. I did read that infections are not uncommon in preemies and most infections will just clear up with antibiotics.

Bob and I went in to visit Megan. Looking at her, you wouldn't think she was fighting off an infection. Instead she was sprawled out snoozing. I did notice that her belly button thing fell off. She has such a cute belly button that is about as big as the eraser on a pencil maybe even smaller.

The nurse said that she has been doing pretty well today, just resting. Her blood gas tests are looking good. They probably won't do another chest x ray until later tonight or tomorrow. She is still taking her feedings well and is now at 6cc every 3 hours.

She opened her eyes while we were there and looked right at us. It was so cute! While we were there the nurse had to turn down her ventilator to 29 which shows she is doing more breathing on her own. She is still on the oscillator (high frequency ventilator). Although she is on the antibiotics for a total of 7 days, she probably won't be on the oscillator for that long. She will switch back to the regular ventilator once Dr. Voora is comfortable with her CO2 levels from her blood gas tests.

Bob went out to find a freezer, but of course nobody has one in stock. He is ordering one from Sears that will be here Friday. We are going to have to get creative with how to store it in our freezer :) I guess we can't buy any frozen food this week until we get the new freezer. There are now well over 100 bottles in our freezer taking up 3 shelves.