Day 8...

Have I mentioned the roller coaster of emotions that come with battling RSV (and probably any other illness that brings children to the hospital)? Yeah, it happens.

This morning, I woke up a bit discouraged. After two or three days of Hayden staying quite comfortable, he was suddenly VERY unhappy. Last night around 10, his numbers started getting all out of whack. So much so that it took until about 12:30 for doctors and nurses to tweak vent settings and do a number of other things to get him comfortable again. Then when I woke up at approximately 4:11 a.m., a couple nurses were around him trying to come up with a plan because his IV had blown. This was so disappointing to hear. He endured multiple unsuccessful IV attempts in the ER and then an unsuccessful PICC line procedure. Before this morning, he  already had three IVs that had blown, so it broke my heart to think about him needing to go through all that again to get another IV.

Then I realized no IV meant he wasn't receiving any of his IV sedatives. I watched him nonstop because I just knew once the sedatives wore off, he'd wake up swinging...literally. I was afraid he'd knock the tube around or out. But no one was more surprised than me when the sedatives started wearing off and his sweet little eyes just started innocently looking around. Content as could be. And he stayed that way all day.

Even when they successfully got a new IV access point, they saw no need to continue IV meds. Yay! Now he's just getting low doses of different sedatives via his feeding tube. This is a great step because along with weaning from the vent, they also have to wean from the meds, but he did wonderfully all day without all of those anyway!

Also, this evening his vent settings were a bit lower and "beautiful" according to the doctors, and his CO2 gasses were much more acceptable. We're still not "aggressively weaning" from the vent, mostly just slowly tweaking, but I'm still happy about this progress.