Well, we have what they call “a setback”. I woke up this morning to a doctor saying, “We’re not going to extubate him this morning.” Before I opened my eyes I thought, “Please God, let that be the other kid, not Eli.” When I opened my eyes they were looking right at Eli. The doctor (a fellow who I really like a lot) looked at me sympathetically and said, “Sorry, we’re going to have to wait another day. We’ll do it tomorrow. His numbers just didn’t look good enough this morning to proceed. His P02 has been near 100, but today it was 70. We need it to be at least 80 or 90 before we can remove the respirator. Plus, I don’t hear any ‘leaking’ in his trachea, which means his throat has swollen around the tube. If we extubate, his throat could swell shut. So we’ll give him some medicine to reduce the swelling and keep him sedated today with the stronger sedation medicine along with doing suctioning and chest PTs for his P02 to go up. We just want to be really conservative before we take away that machine.”
While it’s a bummer to be waiting yet another day (I can’t believe that doctor’s prediction of Monday back on Thursday is actually coming true), we definitely don’t want to rush the extubation. Not much more to say than that, I just knew a lot of people would want to know what to pray for today!