The last couple of days really haven't brought much change unfortunately. Kate is looking more and more like herself as the swelling decreases. However, she continues to have issues with an irregular heart beat and blood pressure regulation, which the doctors hope will get better with time and healing. The description of the heart beat issue, the doctors told us that makes the most sense was this: Kate's upper heart and her lower heart are not communicating right now, so one is beating faster than the other. Instead of a lub/dub beat, her lub is beating at about 180 bpm and her dub is beating at about 140 bpm, so without her pacemakers her heart is very inefficient.
The blood pressure issue seems to be getting better slowly. Her main problem is when she wakes up she continues to stress and move around causing anxiety and this causes her blood pressure to drop. A little counter intuitive but I guess with a heart that isn't functioning at 100%, when the muscles in the heart get tense from the anxiety, the heart function goes down.
With a few more days we hope things will look much better.
Today they are starting to wean her off the ventilator. With this, she can not be on the paralytic drugs they have been using, so she has been moving and fighting her tubes more and more. This is very hard for us to watch as we feel helpless not being able to comfort her or hold her. We hope this will all be over soon and things get back to normal. We are very grateful though that they are able to perform a procedure as complicated and delicate as this on a baby Kate's size. It continues to amaze us how wonderful everyone is at Primary Children's and how much they care for the children they watch over.
The blood pressure issue seems to be getting better slowly. Her main problem is when she wakes up she continues to stress and move around causing anxiety and this causes her blood pressure to drop. A little counter intuitive but I guess with a heart that isn't functioning at 100%, when the muscles in the heart get tense from the anxiety, the heart function goes down.
With a few more days we hope things will look much better.
Today they are starting to wean her off the ventilator. With this, she can not be on the paralytic drugs they have been using, so she has been moving and fighting her tubes more and more. This is very hard for us to watch as we feel helpless not being able to comfort her or hold her. We hope this will all be over soon and things get back to normal. We are very grateful though that they are able to perform a procedure as complicated and delicate as this on a baby Kate's size. It continues to amaze us how wonderful everyone is at Primary Children's and how much they care for the children they watch over.
We've been staying in a condo downtown for the past couple of days. My parents have some friends who own it and are letting us use it for the next couple of weeks. We are so grateful, as this has been a huge convenience. The days seem to go by pretty quick. Marcae was able to get a pass to the Jewish Community Center located just north of the hospital. This has been nice for her to be able to get out and get some exercise and relieve some stress. From what I heard, it sounds like a great facility.
Oh, this poster was made by one of the Child-life Specialists here at Primary's. This sums up Kate pretty well : )
No comments:
Post a Comment