Day 75

Ugh... It's been a long, frustrating day. Late last night, Holden's O2 sats started dropping, but he rebounded somewhat after a while. We had a chest xray that didn't show us anything alarming, so we decided to just watch him a little more closely. His sats never did come back up to where they were before, but they were tolerable.

This morning, he was really pukey again, and didn't keep any of his meds down at all. We found out this afternoon that one of his anti-nausea meds wasn't given this morning, due to a communication error between nurses. He got the med around lunchtime, and that's gotten a little better. His feeds are totally off, and will remain off until we figure out what's going on with his oxygen, his lungs, and his stomach- and until we figure out how it's all related.

His sats started dropping again while the EP nurses were running tests on his pacemaker. (He has yet another weird little quirk with his pacemaker, and his heartbeats are firing in two different areas... Not a big deal, but it shows up really strange on the monitors, and makes them alarm like crazy. They said this is really rare- like he needed something else rare in his health files!!) Anyway, his sats started getting scary low, and they finally put him back on oxygen. The oxygen immediately helped, but now we need to find out why he started requiring more oxygen to begin with. If you feel like you've heard this story before, you have... He's done this a few times already, right before the flash pulmonary edema showed up. I'm praying hard that this is something different!

The doctors and nurses seem to be more on their toes and watching him closely now, which is great compared to earlier. It seemed like we had to push really hard to get anything moving today, and we're not used to that. It's an adjustment going from the constant staff in the ICU to trying to find someone to help on the floor. I don't feel like they moved quickly enough to put him back on the oxygen, or to find out what the problem was to begin with, but now they're running all of their tests and he's much more comfortable. Hopefully, all of us are on the same page now, and Holden can get the care and attention he needs!