48 Hours!

Hey everyone,
Andrew successfully made it through the first 48 hours post-op, which was the most critical time! The doctors are starting to use words like "cautiously optimistic" and the nurses think he's doing great! Thanks for all your prayers, and keep them up - he's not out of the woods yet.

The past 24 hours have been busy for Andrew - a couple steps back, but plenty of steps forward. This morning around 4AM, his oxygen saturation levels started to fall. A chest X-ray revealed that his lungs were overinflated. Poor Teresa got very little sleep. Recall that he is on an oscillating ventilator, meant to keep his lungs inflated all the time and give him very short shallow breaths. They tried moving him to a standard ventilator but he didn't respond well to that. They put him back on the oscillator and lowered the mean pressure and the cycle time. That seemed to do the trick, and his blood gas levels are now fine. In fact, they've been lowering the oxygen level that he's been on all day. Yesterday he was on 60%, but after the ventilator incident, they bumped him back up to 90%. Since then, they've slowly lowered him down to 55%. The goal is to get him down to 50% - above that level, oxygen can cause cellular damage - but he needs a bit more than that right now to keep his blood saturation levels up. Hopefully by the time I go back tomorrow morning, he'll be on 50%.

His heart is working perfectly, and his lungs are doing what they're supposed to with the ventilator's help. He's not yet capable of breathing on his own, but hopefully he'll get there. It may be a week or two, though. But with the ventilator moving the air through, his lungs are doing the job of gas exchange. His kidneys are still having a little trouble. He is producing plenty of urine, which is good, but the toxin levels - particularly creatinine (? - I'm going on memory here) - are still about 3x normal. The levels are still rising, but they're leveling off. The doctors are not too concerned about this (it would have to be 7-8x normal to be a huge concern) and they think the kidneys should recover fully in the next couple of days.

So, overall, he's still a very sick baby, but his condition is improving. :)

As you can see in the picture below, he had his eyes open for a while today - up to a couple of minutes. He was even looking around a bit but he's still very heavily sedated. He seemed to be wanting to shake it off, but his heart rate shot up to 210bpm and his blood pressure to 110/60 (matched Teresa's! A normal newborn is ~ 55/40 or so and they're trying to keep his at around 70/50).

Teresa and I are holding up OK - she got to go home for a while today to get a nap and a shower. She didn't want to leave Andrew's side but the nurse made her for her own good. She's doing better now.

Lucas has been entertaining everyone in the hospital. He's not allowed in the ICU, so he's been spending his time riding up and down the elevators with Grandma while playing the harmonica. Folks seem to get a kick out of his "elevator music". :)