Thursday, December 20, 2007

Abby is still fighting. She is an amazing little baby. Today was nerve racking, but ended up ok. We didn't really lose any ground today.

They went in to clean out her chest, and ended up trying to see if they could get her off ECMO. They kind of did a trial run. They had her "off" the ECMO for over 2 hours. She was still physically connected to the machine, but she was doing all the work. (Once they surgically remove the cannulas from her heart, it's basically a "one shot deal" - there really wouldn't be enough time to get a new machine hooked up.) They decided that she was close, but that her lungs weren't quite ready. We saw her x-rays from 3:00pm today and they looked the best they have been. The plan is to let her recover tonight, then see what her lungs look like tomorrow, and then maybe try and take her off the ECMO. Abby is now on a oscillating ventilator, the vibrating one wasn't quite working for her. This seems to be helping her lungs quite a bit.

She literally has 10-15 doctors, nurses, surgeons, and respiratory techs constantly thinking about her. They do the rounds at 9:30-10:00 every morning and one doctor has to combine and balance all the opinions and ideas. He, Dr. Mark Buchholz, is responsible for writing the orders this week. She has well over 100 years of experience helping her. As one doctor has said, theories are great, but it always comes down to how she reacts to these different things, i.e. different medicines, ventilators, procedures, etc.

Tomorrow is another day, you never know what is going to happen. But we hope and pray she continues to improve. Her lungs are the thing we are concentrating on. If they can heal another day or two, she can come off the ECMO. The heart surgeon has been very pleased with the way her heart has performed.

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