8.22.08

Today, we're going to pick the least bad thing, again. Yesterday, Ethan's nasopharyngeal tubes got clogged, which meant that he went back on the "regular" prongs they use for CPAP. He didn't like those one bit, and the tubes were put back in.

As the day wore on, the carbon dioxide levels were getting worse, necessitating us to make a "least bad" decision. If we continued to wrestle around with the CPAP, we might make Ethan more comfortable or we might not, but we still had to contend with high levels of CO2 in his blood, which obviously presents serious risks. (An intriguing point that I didn't know is that the human brain will actually sacrifice itself and shut down if there's too much CO2 to try and save the other organs).

With our first priority to lower the CO2, the decision was made to intubate Ethan for the third time, giving his lungs a break from having to work, lowering the CO2 levels quickly, and letting his caloric intake go to his body and not his efforts in breathing for a little while.

Ethan was intubated at 3:10 p.m., being his usual gracious and cooperative self, hand-fighting anybody that came near his head. (I love his fighting spirit, but do we have to fight every battle?)

By 6 p.m., his CO2 levels had dropped somewhat, but the ventilator settings were close to their maximum outputs, so another "least bad" decision was made: we would switch out his ventilator for what's called a "Jet" ventilator. The "Jet" has a wider range of settings and would be able to lower his CO2 levels without maxing out, and more importantly, causing any damage to Ethan's lungs.

The Jet looks like something Darth Vader would hook himself up to, with more tubes and wires than the last ventilator. The person who developed it was an aeronautics engineer and he used spare airplane cockpit equipment to fab the boxes and gauges, hence the name(?) It was here that I also learned the NICU ratio: the smaller the child, the bigger the machines.

After an hour of tube reeling and knob twiddling, the Jet was set and Ethan was breathin' (did I just type that??), and Lisa, Alli, and I made tracks for home.

Oh, and the first day of school for me went fine.