NICU Day 28

Where do I start on Will's update today. I'm really not sure how to explain it all but here goes. Will had a good night off the ventilator last night. His chest xray showed that his lungs are not getting fully inflated as they would like which means he is not taking deep enough breaths on his own by being off the ventilator. His blood gas this morning was good other than the CO2 level which was high. Since it was high, they started him on a breathing treatment. When they give him his breathing treatments, they give him Albuterol which is a bronchodilator that relaxes muscles in the airways and increases air flow to the lungs. When they give him medicine, it spikes his heartrate up to 215ish and they don't like that. But the heartrate is supposed to be back to normal range (150-170) after 1 hour and his is not and is taking longer to reach that normal range. So now he will only get the breathing treatments but not the albuterol if his heartrate is higher than the 160s. The breathing treatments will help him to breathe deeper and on his own so they can't quit those but can quit the albuterol. His breathing treatments occur every 6 hours at 7 and 1. So right now Will is trucking along and we are hoping not to have another heartrate spike during his breathing treatments. So today we are letting Will rest. Our nerves are shot because you don't want to see your child's heartrate over 200 and we can't stand it when he gets that albuterol. So we are keeping a close eye on him today and not staying too far away but also letting him rest. As far as his weight, he did loose about 10 grams which is okay because he went from having a tube stuck down his throat to no tube at all. So that constitutes for the changes in weight. He weighs 1lb 5oz or 590 grams. But we are still hoping for that weight increase tomorrow.