Near miss

I woke at 7am and went immediately up to see Kay, accompanied by Leonie, with hope in my heart for a better start to the day. But when we walked into her room, her O2 saturation was 88% and dropping. With a growing feeling of panic I watched it drop down to 81%, with Kay turning a purplish colour. I was so scared I asked Leonie to go and fetch Marion, it seemed like disaster was imminent. The nurse who had been with Kay all night said that actually she'd been doing pretty well. O2 supply had been turned down to 85%, a big improvement. But 30 mins earlier she had had to clean Kay's nappy and Kay reacted badly, her saturation dropping.

The doctor came in and carefully boosted Kay's already high ventilation pressure, still to a lower figure than yesterday fortunately. Very slowly Kay's saturation started to creep upwards and during the next hour reached 93%. Still, what we need to see is a return to the lower pressures, lower O2 feed and steady saturation of the night.

But one thing that we have noticed is that if Kay is not sedated deeply enough she fights the ventilation and we all had the feeling this morning that she was only lightly in a coma. Certainly I can imagine that Kay would react badly to a nurse pushing on her to force her rectum to empty if she were only lightly sleeping. Kay hates all unwanted intervention and she's getting a hell of a lot. So they're now discussing increasing the sedation. I hope that this will improve her breathing as well.

Another scary start to the day, but after an optimistic night. But you can see just how fragile Kay is. Let's hope that the day only gets better.