Day 29

Uneventful days are the bee's knees.  Today was an uneventful day.

Avery has been doing well on the steroids and will continue to be weaned off the ventilator.  The doctor is hopeful to transition her to a CPAP within a couple of days.  That will be awesome to see, so I hope it works out.

Wren kept getting some food residue back in her throat, so she needed to have her feeding tube pushed further down.  It's now pushed inside the intestine a bit on a slow drip.  This will slow down the digestive benefit she'd get from getting food deposited in the stomach, but will prevent her from getting agitated from food getting in her throat.  They can pull that back probably once the breathing tube is out of her left lung.  Somewhere down the road, when she's older and much bigger, she will most likely need to have a lobectomy performed - a surgery to remove the damaged lobe of the lung that was hit heaviest by the infection.  This is because being filled with those air blebs stretched and distended the lung tissue, such that even if it scars over appropriately, it could always present some level of risk to her until it was completely removed.  Unfortunately she won't be able to just make new cells to make up for the lost tissue.

I was able to snap a picture of a before-and-after shot of her chest x-rays.  The picture on the left shows her lungs after the infection and before they moved the breathing tube.  The huge black area are the air-filled blebs where the tissue was damaged by the pneumonia.  At that point, the blebs were getting large enough to push her other lung and her heart some.  In the right picture, this is her as of this morning, with the small breathing tube going into the left lung, the left lung filling nicely with oxygen, and the right lung nice and completely flattened with all the air gone out of the blebs.  It's easy to see with little understanding how much better she looks.  You can also see her feeding tube going through the stomach and into the intestines.  

When they decide to take the breathing tube back so it can fill both lungs again, they are hoping that it will have been a long enough wait that enough healing can have happened in the right lung.