Back on the Vent

They put Blakelee on the ventilator this morning. She had another grade 4 A&B early this morning. Rather than continue to ride the roller coaster they put her on the vent. This way she can rest and not fight to keep her stats up. They were going to do another spinal tap this morning because the one they got the other day had too much blood in it. They are going to hold off on that now and just let her rest.

I'm not sure why they let me update this blog because I seem to forget so many things. Yesterday they started medicine to treat her open PDA.

"The Patent Ductus Arteriosus (PDA) is a blood vessel that connects the main vessel leading to the lungs to the main vessel of the body. When babies are in the womb, this blood vessel is open because babies aren't using their lungs to breathe so it allows most of the blood to bypass the lungs and go to the rest of the body. Once babies are born, the blood vessel will gradually narrow and then close after a few hours or days. In preemies, especially those who have had respiratory distress syndrome, the blood vessel may stay open."

  

When they did the heart echo on Tuesday they found that the PDA was still very open. Yesterday they started giving her the medication to hopefully close it. Today they started a second IV of the medicine, so now she has one in her hand and one in her leg. They will do another heart echo tomorrow and see if any progress has been made to close the PDA. Although they don't think that the open PDA is causing the severe A&Bs it is something that needs to be taken care of. If the medicine doesn't work in closing the PDA they will talk about surgery. We should know more after the echo tomorrow.

Please keep our little one and her family in your prayers. This part isn't being very fun.

*PS - They still won't feed her until this is all figured out. Super Sad, she loves her food and she hasn't eaten since Monday.