12-21-10

It's 9:00 pm when I'm typing this latest entry.  Let me just tell you that the last 13 hours have taken us through the roller coaster of emotions. 

When Randy called this morning, around 8 am, the report was that Cooper had a "restless" night.  They ended up going back to 100% ecmo.  This was a big setback and meant starting at square one again. 

When we arrived at the hospital, they had switched over to the conventional ventilator.  We knew this was going to happen, but didn't realize that they would have to start him at 100% support and wean him off this before they could even think about weaning on the ecmo.  Good news though.  The parameters were to go down by 5% every 30 minutes as long as his saturations remained above 95%.  He was able to achieve this by 4pm.  Never missed a beat.  And this was all with him still being somewhat restless.

One of the nurse practitioners finally had a grand idea to call the PICU and see what they use for sedation for ideas on what to use on Cooper.  It paid off.  They suggested pentobarbitol...and it worked.  For the first time in days, he is actually sleeping soundly.  He actually looks peaceful, finally.

When we left the hospital tonight, they had started to wean him off the ecmo.  They were down to 93%.  We are hoping that he will continue to do well throughout the night and be able to come down more.  Both Randy and I are simply hoping that he will make it to about 80% by the time we get there in the morning.  We just want him/them to take it nice and slow so he can adjust a little easier.  Slow and steady wins the race.

Both the neonatologist and the surgeon are very hopeful now.  They both said that Cooper seems to like the new vent better and he was looking good.  No news today about when they were thinking about surgery and which surgery it would be.  Even they are adapting to Cooper time.

So, the day started off with bad news, just draining us before the day even really started.  And now it's ending with us full of hope again that Cooper may be off ecmo by Christmas. 

Here's to hoping for a good night sleep for Cooper, for us, and for everyone else out there.

Sonya