Saturday evening

Today has been relatively quiet! Emma Kate was taken off the heli-ox and just put on oxygen through a nasal cannula, which she is tolerating so much better than the mask! She's doing great with her oxygenation still. She's making less noise when she breathes, but when she's awake she still has a significant expiratory effort. She looks really good (still not 100% "normal" though) when she's asleep. They attempted to get a peripheral catheter again today, in an effort to be able to remove the central line that is getting old. They had a hard time getting one- she was a bit of a pin cushion for a while there, again. They did get one in her left arm, but were concerned that it wasn't the greatest or most "secure" access, since they had some trouble with it. It seems to be flushing fine, so hopefully it will be ok. The hard part is that she has to wear a board brace on that arm so she won't damage anything, and it's really heavy for her to move it around now. They started her feeds back slowly through the TP line, and so far she is tolerating it well. They may possibly pull her NG drain and her pacer wires tomorrow if she's still doing well. They're starting to decrease her Precedex again, and should be off it completely by morning if she tolerates the decrease without getting agitated again. We're hoping to get her in a bigger bed tomorrow so that we can cuddle with her in the bed instead of having to try to get her out of it. There's some talk of her being moved out of the ICU sometime early in the week if she continues to do well.

She's been very quiet and sleeping through most of the day, and just this evening has started being a little more awake, she tried and tried to turn onto her belly to sleep, and with the OK of the attending doctor, we let her. She slept comfortably for a little while, but then couldn't get her braced arm in the position she wanted, and she got upset about it. She's got a tiny little squeaky voice tonight, and I still can't tell what she's saying, but it is so sweet to hear her voice!

One other note Greg reminded me about- for any blog readers with kids- if you have children's videos or movies that your kids have outgrown, consider donating them to a hospital- it's so nice to have a bit of a library to select from to help occupy the long hours spent sitting in the bed! Some of the rooms here even still have a VHS player with a DVD player, so consider getting rid of all those old video tapes or DVDs for a good cause!