Troubles

Lynnea continues to hang in there, but she didn't exactly have a great day today. They decided to start to ween her off from some of her medications. She is now completely off from epinephrine, which is good news. She had a little more difficulty when they tried to take her off from her muscle relaxants and sedatives. When she woke up, she became very upset and wasn't tolerating the ventilator well at all -- the ventilator was set to do pretty much all of her breathing for her because, while she was so heavily sedated, it wasn't possible for her to breathe on her own. She tried to breathe against the ventilator, which is counterproductive, and caused her saturations to drop. Since no one really thought she was ready to be taken off from the ventilator completely, they turned down the rate that the ventilator was breathing for her so that it's now doing only a minimal amount of breathing for her. This isn't ideal, but so far she is managing to do most of the work of breathing on her own, and hopefully tomorrow they can take her off from the ventilator altogether. In order to help her stay calm, they gave her a different sedative that would hopefully have fewer side effects than what she was on before. The new sedative kept her calm, but relaxed her more than they had expected, so her heart rate and blood pressure were lower than ideal also today. And, to top things off, this evening there was a problem with the IV line that they have in her heart to monitor her CVP (Central Venus Pressure) and her blood pressure. . . instead of sitting in her right atrium like it's supposed to, it slid down into the right ventricle of her heart, so it had to be repositioned. I don't know exactly how this is done because I came into the room as they were finishing up, and didn't ask. Hopefully, the rest of her night is quiet and uneventful.