A Quiet Day

There’s not much going on for Hana today. The highlight was they pulled all four chest tubes and doing so created a pneumothorax on both the left and right. Basically, air is trapped between the chest wall and the lung. This can cause her lung to collapse. They do an immediate chest X-ray to monitor. They also watch Hana’s breathing and they turned her hi flow oxygen up to 8L, which also means they had to stop her feeds. She was getting a very small amount of feeds but she can’t get anything in her stomach until her Hi flow is turned down to 4L. The surgeon was very concerned about the pneumothoraces and wanted to put chest tubes back in right away, but another chest X-ray showed that the right one had already resolved and the left one was almost gone. 

Other small details – they’ve shut off the pacemaker and Hana’s heart rate has been around 120. She is taking one of her medications by mouth! One immunosuppressant, Tacrolimus, can not be given through Hana’s feeding tube because it adheres to the wall of the tube. It must go in her mouth. She was so thirsty that she licked it right up. I’m relieved because I thought for sure this was going to be a struggle or that she would just gag and vomit every time. They are turning off a lot of Hana’s drips. She’s still on a little epinephrine and milrinone, but those might be shut off over night. She is still getting infused Lasix and therefore, potassium because the Lasix depletes her potassium. They dropped one of the antibiotics because her MRSA results came back negative. She will get another dose of the immunosuppressant, ATG, the fourth in a series of five doses. The list of other immunosuppressants is already getting long – prednisone, Cellcept and three more added today to the Tacrolimus I already mentioned.

Hana has been VERY quiet. She lies in bed and looks around. Sometimes she looks at the tv or iPad. Sometimes she looks like she is about to fall asleep. Sometimes she makes eye contact. She doesn’t seem happy or sad or frustrated or listless. I don’t know what to make of it. Sometimes I wonder if she is maybe a little bored or depressed but maybe not.

If everything goes perfectly, she may get to get out of the CVICU and go back upstairs as soon as this weekend!