Sweet Little Feet

Sofia had a better night last night. Today she has been stable. Her blood pressure is still a little on the low side, and her pulse is still high, but her blood gases have all been very good. She's still on the high frequency vent with her oxygen setting at 65%. They repositioned her chest tube on the left side around noon to try to get some more of the air and fluid around that left lung to come out. She just had a chest xray at 4:00 pm, and it showed a little bit of an improvement in getting that left lung reexpanded after that big air leak yesterday morning.

She seems very comfortable today and looks like she has good pain control. They seem to have found a good level for now with her morphine and versed drips, so they haven't changed them from yesterday. Her morphine is still at 140, and her versed is still at 110. She hasn't needed as many extra doses of pain medicine today.

Her incision is a lot less red, and her white count has gone down since yesterday with the antibiotics on board. She has a low grade temperature again this afternoon. It's still early, but her cultures so far have shown no growth of bacteria, so that's good news. We won't know for sure on those for another day probably.

Her chest and head are still very swollen. They are replacing the fluid volume that drains out of her chest tubes. She gets 1/2 cc of albumin (albumin is a large protein found in the blood) for every 1 cc of fluid that drains from her chest tubes. She's also getting 2-3 additional boluses of albumin per day to help draw some of the fluid that's causing her swelling back into her vascular system, so she can pee it off. This should help not only her swelling, but also her blood pressure and heartrate.

Yesterday afternoon they removed the dressing and drain from her ECMO cannula incision site. The incision is about an inch long on the right side of her neck, and it's already healing so well! I think you'll barely be able to see where it was once it is all healed. She already has 5 major battle wounds, so hopefully they will all heal as well as that one.

We actually ventured out of the hospital yesterday afternoon for a couple of hours to try to find Sofia some furniture, so she has a place to rest her cute little head when we take her home. We didn't find anything we liked yesterday, so we're still looking, but Daddy did pick out some little socks to keep her feet warm. And of course I had to make a little scrapbook of her first socks :-) . . .

Make a scrapbook - it's easy!