Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Serena update #2

Thank you all for your emails, messages, and texts. I appreciate your concern and it is comforting to know people are pulling for Serena. Serena has her ups and downs, but she is on an upswing right now. They put a bed in our room at my request (as opposed to a crib) and allowed Serena to sleep with me last night. She got much more sleep and is still sleeping now at 9:45am. She was weaned down on the concentration of her oxygen via Vapo-Therm and is now at 8 liters at 70%, which is still a significant amount of support. It's a LONG way from even getting her onto oxygen via a nasal cannula.
On the plus side, they allowed her to go from continuous albuterol treatments (can you imagine how difficult this was to keep a breathing treatment on her 24/7!?!?!) to every hour, which is much better. If she continues to improve they will space them out to 2 hours, etc. But I don't want to get my hopes up because they tried the one hour spacer yesterday afternoon and they felt she was working too hard and put her back to continuous. 1 step forward, 2 steps back...the dance that those of us with medically fragile children go through.
Now another concern is her elevated blood sugar. This could be for a number of reasons, including her steroids, but they are going to finger stick her and check things out. She also lost her 3rd IV last night!!!!! This next attempt will be her 6th stick since Monday...I'm so upset about it and refuse to hold her down this time. She goes off color every time and it breaks my heart to see her in so much pain.
They still don't know which virus this is, RSV and the other take 5-7 days to grow, so we won't have a definitive negative until then.
So we'll definitely not be going home today, or probably even tomorrow. Perhaps Sat or Sunday if we're lucky.
Please continue to pray and keep Serena in your thoughts. We all can't wait to see her feeling better and back to her happy, playful, energetic self! And she and I really miss little Edwin, aka "N-E" as she calls him.

5 comments:

Randi said...

Oh Steph, I am so sorry for everyhting going on. I know they probably don't allow vsitors in the PICU, but if I could offer any help I would.
We are still praying hard,
Randi

Nathali said...

OMG, I can't believe it!! We'll be praying for all of you!!!

Sarah said...

Good heavens, WTH happened?! I hope you have some answers soon.

I am praying for you and thinking of you.

Sarah said...

I hope she feels better soon!!!

Emily said...

Still praying for her!!!