Friday, March 10, 2006

Day 41

Another decent day. We had the skin doc come and look at his head and she says that she thinks it's starting to heal, it's clean, and to just keep putting antibiotics on it and keep him off it.

Dr Foker came and said his incision looks good, but everyone else agreed he's on crack (nurses words, not mine) because it's a mess, but if Dr Foker is happy, were happy. He will definitely have a lot of scarring, from where the stitches have pulled and ripped his skin, but that's ok.

After spending much of the day working on clearing one of his chest tubes that wasn't draining (it was coming out every hole in his chest instead) they decided to place a larger tube in and so far it seems to have done the trick. If it doesn't work out they may have to take all the tubes out and replace them in the sides of his chest through his ribs instead.

They also decided today to start to wean one of his cardiac meds, dopamine. His pressures since have been fairly low, in the mid 60's (they want him above 65 to wean the dopa and above 55 all the time systolic) but they think that part of that may be that with the PD they have really dried him out so they are going to work on fluid replacement.

The nurses also discussed turning his O2 down on his vent cause his sats are in the high 90's and since he's a mixer (his red blood mixes with his blue blood in his heart through the ventricular septal defect) they don't really need to keep his sats that high. We'll see about that

To get out of the ICU we have to be off the vent and off all cardiac meds via IV (he may go home on oral) so that's the plan right now, to wean him off all that and get his kidneys working again. They aren't right now and whether that's because he's so dry from the pd or the fact that his heart is stressed is unclear at the moment.

Hoping to hold him soon!

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