Thursday, October 2, 2014

CAN'T BELIEVE I'M TYPING THIS

So, give us 10 hours or so, and we can really shake things up. When I last left you from Blogland, everything was on schedule for us to be discharged on Saturday morning. Not anymore. Colby hasn't had a great day. We noticed he wasn't improving at the same speed he has been. Plus he was having some trouble keeping his oxygen up. Nothing crazy, his oxygen was hanging around 93-94. Just made you stop and look at Colby like hey, what's going on with you, kiddo. The RT and I were doing Colby's afternoon respiratory treatment, and the attending doctor happened to be in our room. He said hey, Colby's chest is rising much more on the right side than on the left. Ah shit. You wouldn't notice it if you were up by Colby's chest doing his treatment. But I went back to where the doctor was standing at the foot of the bed and sure enough, the left side of Colby's chest was not rising properly during CoughAssist. Red flag. Big freakin' ugly red flag. We immediately got a chest x-ray, which shows...drumroll please...Colby's left lung is collapsed. Completely collapsed. I know, right?! I can't even believe I'm reporting this, but it's true. The doctor just came in and we talked it over. Hence, therefore, we had to come up with another plan, which is as follows:

It's safe to say we're NOT going home on Saturday. Ambulance transport has been cancelled. We've raised the pressures on Colby's vent. We'll return to doing respiratory treatments every 4 hours instead of every 6. We're hoping, praying, that these changes help "pop" that left lung open. If not, they will want to do a bronchoscopy on Colby tomorrow. In talking to the attending doctor, I said you know, some of us in the SMA world think these bronchoscopy procedures are done too often. Can you guarantee that if you do this bronch, you will find the source of the collapse (probably a big plug sitting in his lung) and be able to fix it? He said, well, no. Fantastic. Super duper. So, we're praying the extra treatments and upped pressures fix the collapse. However, knowing Colby's history, we'll probably have to go to Plan C. That would be the bronchoscopy. I don't know yet. Not knowing. It's horrible.

It's going to be a long night. Colby will be getting treatments at 8PM, midnight, 4AM and 8AM. And I'll be making sure they are done exactly on time. I'll be up assisting with every one of them. So, Colby could use a couple prayers if you have some to spare. We changed his vent mode a couple days ago. Tonight we've changed the vent settings. We're adding water to the cuff. We're increasing respiratory treatments. This needs to work. SOMETHING needs to work. Colby has been sick since September 17th and we've been in this hospital 5 days. I don't want this to drag out into some disgusting 30-something day hospital stay like we've had in the past. I'm so frustrated and I'm so sad for Colby. If anyone wants him to get better, I'm sure it's HIM. Hate seeing my sweet boy like this. I'll update as soon as I can in the morning to let you know how the night went. Bleh.

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