Monday, June 9th - Another Reason Not to Like Mondays

We arrive shortly after the morning shift change. Dot and Teresa get us updated on Kinley and her night. Overall, it was a pretty uneventful night. Kinley did need a few extra doses of BP medication, morphine and versed to make it through though.

This morning Kinley had a chest x-ray, a head ultrasound and a heart echo test. We are still waiting to hear back on the final results, but none of the technicians gave any indication that they could see anything different from their last scan. Kinley got a bit upset before her heart echo test and sent her BP to a new high. (Hello gray hair!) They had to give her some extra drugs to get her to calm down. Kinley also had an oxygen challenge this morning, but it was not one of her best. She only scored in the 60s.

During rounds Dr. W and Dr. E discussed Kinley and her treatment. The results are back from Kinley's heart echo and her pulmonary pressure is still too high to consider coming off of ECMO today. Kinley's morning chest x-ray showed that the upper lobe of her right lung continues to be closed. Her lung should be more open after 4 days of being on NO (nitrous oxide). Both Dr. W and Dr. E believe they know, based on Kinley's last tracheal aspirate, why her lung is not responding to the NO. It turns out that Kinley has pneumonia. The antibiotics that Kinley has been on the past few days have been fighting the pneumonia on a broad spectrum basis and today they will change to a new antibiotic that will more specifically target the pneumonia. On top of the pneumonia, both doctors are concerned that Kinley might also have sepsis. If she does have sepsis that will be a much bigger concern because sepsis is when the disease is in the blood and being spread throughout the body. Sepsis is much harder to fight.

We are hoping and praying that her pneumonia has not spread to her blood and that she will have a speedy recovery so we can get her lung open and get her off of ECMO.