Saturday, June 7th - Kinley knows what she is doing

When we arrived at Kinley's baby station today we found Dot and Tiffani taking care of our little girl. They gave us the latest update on Kinley.

Last night was a rough one for Kinely. If you remember from yesterday, her stats were not great once she was switched back to the ECMO machine for full support. She had a hard time keeping her oxygen up and her CO2 down even with some tweaking of her ECMO settings. The doctors ordered a chest x-ray to see if anything else could be causing the problem. The x-ray showed that her right lung was not as open as it was earlier in the day. Also, if you can remember from yesterday, Kinley got a tracheal aspirate to see if she had an infection in her lungs. The tracheal aspirate did show signs of an infection and the continuous mucus being removed from Kinley's breathing tube has confirmed it. Kinley is now on 3 different antibiotics to treat the infection. It is a good thing that Kinley let us know that she was not ready to come off of ECMO because it would have been really hard for her to be responsible for all of her gas exchange and fight off the infection at the same time. She is such a smart girl! Kinley's been moved back to the high frequency ventilator to help open her lungs back up and her morphine drip has been increased to 80. We are going to let her rest over the weekend and fight off her infection and hopefully early next week she will be ready to come off of ECMO.

Kinley also got a new roommate overnight. All of the commotion made her a little agitated and she required a dose of morphine and versed to help calm her down.

This morning Dr. S ordered an abdominal ultrasound because her abdomen looked swollen. The radiologist has not been able to view the ultrasound results yet, but an initial viewing looks like Kinley's liver is enlarged. There is nothing we can do to get it back to normal right now because its swelling is directly connected with Kinley's pulmonary hypertension. Once her hypertension is under better control her liver should return to its normal size.

Overall, Kinley is looking much better than she was yesterday. Her entire body is more pink. It was kind of white and gray yesterday. The mucus coming from her lungs, although still constant, is less colored. Dot and Tiffani suction Kinley's breathing tube every hour to make sure there isn't too much mucus build up. One big concern Kathy and I have today is that Kinley's BP is very high. We are worried that her high BP will cause a bleed in her brain and since she is on heparin (a blood thinner) that could cause serious brain damage. The doctors continue to monitor her blood pressure, but are hesitant to try to lower it right now. According to the doctors, if her blood pressure is higher in her extremities, it means that hopefully it is higher than the pressure in her lungs and this might be Kinley's way of correcting her pulmonary hypertension. We will just have to nervously wait and see.