Day 550 - MOSI Museum 🦖🦕 & New Pediatric Flowmeter 🌬️
Sunday, July 3rd, 2022
Mom managed to find some Meg Bloks on FB Marketplace yesterday, so today we washed and sterilized them all.
Today we went to the MOSI museum James was able to see his first dinosaurs and experience a planetarium. This was Dad's first time in a planetarium too! The planetarium was kind of tricky cuz it was a small room with a lot of people and we had a long double stroller packed to the brim, but everyone gave us room and made it work. It started out pretty interesting but then James fell asleep as the room got darker and they showed us more and more stars with unpronounceable names. 😂
Although there wasn't a lot he could do, just being able to get out of the house and push James around a new environment is so good for him (and for Mom & Dad). MOSI used to have a deal with Bank of America that the first full weekend of the month would be free for Bank of America customers but it seems like they removed themselves from the list of museums last month. Everybody is struggling right now with this economy.
In the mail we received our order for a pediatric flowmeter (pictured below) from our DME. It took 1 month to receive which is ridiculous because they have them in stock and all they have to do is mail it out. Mom had to follow up several times and even get our Insurance Case Manager involved. The reason we asked for a pediatric flow meter is because we are trying to wean James' oxygen. In order to wean oxygen under 1 liter you need a pediatric flowmeter to be able to adjust the oxygen into smaller increments for low flow usage. We're talking about weaning him in increments of 0.0625 vs 0.5. Honestly even when we were weaning him at 0.5 it was super hard to tell if he was at .5 or .75 because there are no lines! We can't wait to get this hooked up for him! Unfortunately we didn't receive any directions. So Mom has reached out to the trach mom's Facebook groups to see if she can get some answers.
James has been at .5 liters for a while now. What does that mean? We look at the pulse ox and make sure his oxygen saturation is between 95%-99%, if we see him satting at 100% for a while we can then wean the concentrator. If he is below 95% for a while with a good sensor reading then we'll increase the flow. His range has been .5 liters to .75 liters over the last few months. Just for comparison, James' oxygen settings in the NICU and PICU ranged from 35% to 85%. Compare that to now he is at only 22.5% (equal to about .5 liters of oxygen). So he has made huge progress! That last little percentage though sometimes takes the longest to wean!
Did you know? Room air is 21% oxygen, so you are breathing a FiO2 of 21% without supplemental oxygen. When you use a flow rate of 1 liter per minute, your FiO2 increases to 24 percent. Every liter beyond that increases the FiO2 by about 4 percent.
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