Day 107 - Chest Retractions

Friday, April 16th, 2021

Today we noticed that James had pretty bad chest retractions. We also had a new Doctor today (well, not new but they change every couple of days). The only real variable is that we made a couple of changes to his ventilator settings over the last 2 days. The main change was that they increased his i-time to allow him to have a longer exhale. He did fine while he was sleeping. 

We had the doctor take a look and he decided to make a change to the ventilator settings. This worked well for about 30 minutes and then James started retracting again. We contacted the doctor. He decided since James had a good x-ray, good blood gases (some of the lowest we've seen), his heart rate and oxygen looked good, but he was still having severe retractions that maybe he could just use an extra dose of morphine. Are we just chasing the gases? The morphine seemed to do the trick for the rest of the day. That also meant that James was just sleeping all day.

5am Update: He had a pretty rough night again.  Severe BPD spells with desats and bradys. Mom slept about an hour.

It is very frustrating not having any way to calm a baby during a BPD episode. Anything will set them off, nothing will calm them down. James will look as if he is choking, turn purple, and be drenched in sweat. His lungs are spasming out of control.

#pleasesendhelp

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Chest Retractions 

Normal Work of Breathing