Thursday, Feb 19

Well, the party's over - and the party girl crashed hard! Last night around 2:30 AM when Linzy and the nurses were completely out of ideas of ways to get Abby to sleep and poor Abby was crying and beside herself due to exhaustion, she was given another dose of whatever super drug they'd used the night before - and Abby has barely woken up since! She literally slept the day away today.

She made some big progress today - even while sleeping! She traded her high flow, high humidity oxygen machine for just regular oxygen, and we had our first meeting with a speech therapist to start working on her suck/swallow reflex and bottle feeds again. This was not a highly productive meeting as Abby has been on continuous feeds through her feeding tube (currently placed at the top of her intestine)... and as you may recall from her pre-surgery days, our little princess only eats when she darn well feels like it. We think she'll have better luck eating when the doctors turn off her continuous feeds and allow her to get a little hungry... and also when she's more awake - the party girl took a few sips and passed out again. The Intensivists (the doctors here in the PICU - experts on all internal systems) are more concerned with giving her good nutrition. Getting her to take a bottle is something we can play around with when we leave the ICU.

The only reason we're still here is her funny little heart rate that she had a few days ago as well. She'd stayed away from the lower heart rate for a few days - but it came back yesterday. The Intensivist explained that what the body really needs is a certain volume of blood moving at all times. Different people have the ability to move different volumes of blood with each pump. If you can move a high volume of blood, you can have a low heart rate. Most infants can not move high volumes of blood - so they have heart rates in the 130's and higher. Abby's heart rate has dipped into the high 70's a couple times... but the doctors are noticing that her blood pressure, color, pulses, etc. are not affected when she does this. They think this is just her norm - although it is not the norm for infants Abby's age. While they monitor it for one more day they want to keep her on the pacemaker... equipment not allowed out on the Pediatrics floor. The cardiologists and Intensivists are thinking we'll be moving tomorrow. We're okay with being non-intense patients in the ICU - at least we have a private room - and we certainly know a lot of people!