3/3/06

They took him off all sedatives at 2 this morning, off the ventilator at 8:30 this morning, apparently he's having a rough time off the vent though, really having to work to breathe, and they've warned me that he may very well go back on it if he continues to have to work so hard. He's on oxygen right now, to make sure he has plenty of oxygen while he's trying to re-learn to use the muscles that help him breathe. You figure, they haven't been used in 10 days.

I'll be surprised if he stays off of it though. They won't let him lay there working that hard for very long.

The other thing is this: off the sedatives, off the vent, the nurse isn't seeing those worrisome hand and foot movements. But, it could be that his body is so tired from working so hard to breathe that it doesn't have the energy to do it right now.

I think Ginger is right. I'm going to insist that they go ahead and call in the neurologist. I mean, I think that even if the movements stop, they'll call one in just in case, so I figure they should go ahead and do it, before they have to call in a psychologist and the straight-jacket crew for me.

I don't think it has anything to do with the vent malfunction, they handled that pretty damn quickly, and they bagged him for a lot of that time. His sats stayed pretty good through the whole thing (higher than they were on a regular basis before the surgery) and the blue tinge was nothing different than what was "normal" for him before the surgery.

However, it is DEFINITELY something I'll keep in mind. It may be something worth looking into. (I started to say "ask about" but I know better than to think that the hospital would admit that the malfunction may have caused the damage. It's a business after all, and they'd be afraid I'd sue them and use it against them that someone admitted to it.)

And for the record, I'm not the litigious type. I don't think I'd sue, because no one at the hospital caused the malfunction, everyone up there puts their hearts and souls into these kids and works their asses off to take care of them. Besides, suing wouldn't undo the damage even if I won now would it?

Want to hear the funny thing? The docs and nurses that were there at the time bitched about the model of vent he was on, and bitched that they didn't like that kind, but the kind they DID like was no longer being made, and they were having to switch over to the new models. Of course one of the higher-up docs put a squelch on their conversation for "a later time" -meaning a time when we weren't around.