Tuesday strikes again.......

Holly has noticed that we usually have bad days on Tuesdays.

Holly and I went to sit with Aiden early today since she had a followup doctors appointment at 11am. BTW, Holly can drive her car again...good thing since I was planning on going back to work tomorrow.
We arrived at Mercy SJ around 12:30pm and noticed right away that Aiden's Co2 was higher than it should be. The RT's like to see the reading around 50-60, when we arrived it was about 86 and it continued to climb. His O2 saturation was fine, in the mid 90's. When the Co2 read's high they usually re-calibrate the monitor, adjust his O2 intake, and/or move the sensor to a different location. If after all adjustments the reading is still high they will check his "blood gas", which involves drawing some blood and the RT test's it manually. I've watched them draw blood from Aiden before so I sat and watched todays attempt. Veins on little babies aren't as visible as they are on adults so basically the NICU staff have to "feel around" for a vein. I won't go into detail but it took about a 1/2 hour to get some blood from Aiden, in the meantime his C02 kept rising. After they were able to draw some blood they also decided they were going to give Aiden some milk. Aiden's nurse (Dawn), told us that now would be a good time to take a little break since she was going to have to replace Aiden's feeding tube. I guess she thought we looked worried enough already to have to sit through that procedure.

We came back around 20 minutes later. The new feeding tube had been inserted and at that time Dawn told us that they had decided to switch back to the oscillating ventilator that Aiden was initially using when he was born.
Apparently Aiden's C02 levels were a little lower than the sensor was picking up but it was still high enough that they were concerned.

While the "new" ventilator was being set up Holly fed Aiden via the feeding tube. We'll see how his little belly handled that when Holly makes her nightly NICU phone call.

Aiden's Co2 levels started to drop almost immediately when they switched ventilators.

When we left the NICU, his C02 was in the low 70's. We were told that the sensor does usually read about "15" high, so really his C02 was in the 50's.

So it was a tense day in the NICU, but definately better than the previous Tuesdays.

Sorry, no pic today.

Holly tried to get a picture of Aiden trying to suck on his pinky but it was a bit dim in the NICU so nothing was coming out OK