Too much stress in an evening

This evening they decided to try turning Kay on her back to see if this would improve her breathing. Note that yesterday morning, before things got this bad, turning her was considered to be too risky. However, with much care and preparation she was put on her back. Marion & I stood by, just in case anything went wrong. The process went well, but the results were very scary. Before she was turned she had at O2 saturation of 95%. Once turned she briefly reached 92% but the started dropping.

The doctors had decided to use the opportunity to grab a frontal chest xray. But by the time the mobile xray unit came (10 mins) Kay's saturation was down to 85% and decreasing. The nurse told the xray team to hurry up because "we're into reserves here". Preparations were then made to turn her back onto her tummy. Frankly, I was quaking from head to foot. I was so terrified that I developed a skull splitting headache and started to feel quite unwell. But the process of turning her back was again well executed and fairly quickly her saturation returned to 95%. Her heart rate remained pretty stable through out, but her BP was fluctuating for quite a while and was still not stable when we left. We waited an hour or so for the following blood gas results to come in, checked with the medics and are now preparing for bed.

I had a long chat with the head IC doctor this evening. He took the time to explain Kay's xrays to me, comparing yesterday's with last Saturday's. He showed me that most of the infection is in Kay's left lung, but her right lung is also not free of infection. Typically a child of her age should have a lung volume of 400ml, but Kay current has only 160ml and most of that is her right lung. Thus the ventilator is working her right lung in overdrive, while her left lung is not doing much at all. It's actually possible to see this on her rib cage, which is flattened slightly on the back left and rounded slightly on the back right.

The risk is clearly that her right lung becomes too damaged to work properly because of the high pressures involved in ventilating a single poorly working lung. This evening's xray showed no visible damage, but the medics remain unhappy with her lung function and are doing everything they can to think of ways of relieving it. I was told that people can surivive on a single lung, so I conclude that if Kay's right lung can clear up somewhat, another 40ml of volume will make a lot of difference to her breathing. But this is just my too logical thinking, I guess.

Anyway, Kay has survived another day and we just have to hope that enough time can be bought for her to fight off this infection. Meanwhile I have to try and let this evening's stress drain away.

Oh, BTW, Kay is peeing nicely. I'm sure you wanted to know that.