Well, apparently my daughter has a very good sense of time, because Premonday only worked once. I got a call this morning at 6:15am, and as Xina has said, unsolicited calls from the hospital aren't really good calls. This first call was to tell me that they had moved Amelia to another pod. The explanation was that the night resident thought it would be a quiter place for her. Okay... normally babies that have BPD/bad lung disease of very touchy and sensitive to noises, lights and touch. Fine.
I received another call at 7:15am telling me that Amelia had an episode. Apparently, as the nurses were changing, Amelia's tube became plugged with crud from her lungs, and no air was getting through. The alarms went off and Amelia was turning purple already - similar to when she exerbates herself... but much more severe. They got the clog out and got her settled, but the "episode" has cost her easily the last four days of improvement. I didn't know how bad it was until I got here at 2:00 and saw tat she was still a little purple and her eyes still swollen. Her setting are way up and she was on 100% oxygen as they were trying to get her stablized - a long while apparently. And they've stopped her feeds altogether until she recovers fully.
My working theory is that the move dislodged the crud and caused the plug. (That's also the working theory of our primary who was here today but couldn't be with her). She's way too unstable to move - the best run of true stability she has had was about 12 hours, and although she was doing that last night, she had had a bad Saturday morning and was only recovering from that.
To top it off, this pod is louder and brighter than the one she was in to begin with. The lights are turned up all the way, a radio is playing, and parents are playing with their kids. I don't begrudge the parents or the radio playing - as that is for one of the kids in her bed. But it's not exactly "quiter" than where we just moved from... I went over there to talk to our primary - who had to sit with a pretty sick kid instead of Amelia today - and those lights are turned down, everyone was whispering, and there wasn't anything going on.
I heard that our attending doctor, who is the head of the NICU, was most displeased by her being moved without his say so; but he was gone before I had a chance to talk to him. He'll be in tomorrow so we can talk. We will have to try and figure it out. Whether she can go back into the original pod or not, I don't know. Certainly she's too unstable to move at this point.
She's been fighting back today. When I got here, she was at 82% O2, and now she's down to 68% and doing fine. Her last gas wasn't great, but she's had worse. And this morning's gas, after the episode, was fine, too. Not great, but fine.
On the good side, she lost a little more weight last night and she's down to 1450gms, or about 3lbs 4ozs. Her hair is longer - she frequently has bed head - and it appears to be Xina's real hair color - during the periods when Xina doesn't darken or highlight it. and she satting well with her current vent. settings. Hopefully, she can recover enough to eat tonight, but they may wait until our attending returns tomorrow to start that back up.
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