Another Rough Night

Last night Lynnea had another rough night. We no longer have nursing around the clock, so I had the fun of dealing with this myself. She had problems from about 3am on. First she dropped her heart rate much lower than is normal for her, but she managed to pull it back up again. Then her heart rate was climbing higher than we like to see it, so I took her temp to make sure she wasn't spiking a fever. She wasn't. But, at 3:30am I decided to give her Tylenol anyway, just in case, and because she was pretty agitated and I wasn't able to calm her down, so I thought that maybe she was in some pain and the Tylenol would help with that as well. After that she fell asleep again, and dropped her heart rate really low again. So, I switched out her oximeter probe, and moved it to a different location, just to make sure that all of the readings I was getting were accurate, and not due to some equipment malfunction. They were real. And, by then her SATs were running low again, and not coming up on their own. At 4am I gave her a nebulizer treatment hoping that it would help. It didn't. At 4:15am I had to put her on oxygen. That helped a little bit, but didn't really bring her SATs up a whole lot, and her heart rate continued to jump all over the place, climbing much higher than is good for her. By 5am when things hadn't really settled down, I ended up calling the U of M and talking to the on-call cardiology fellow to see if they wanted me to bring her in to the hospital, or if there was something more I could be doing for her at home. They understood why I was concerned, but decided that we should try to wait it out at home for a little longer before bringing her in because there probably wasn't much more they could do for her at the hospital than I was already doing for her at home. Around 6:45am, Lynnea finally managed to fall asleep again, and slept peacefully until around 8am, only dropping her heart rate briefly a couple of times during that time. After that she was doing better, and by noon we had weaned her off from her oxygen again. She was stable most of the day, but tonight after bathtime, she dropped her SATs again, and is on oxygen again. I'm hoping that she does better overnight tonight.