OK so I wrote out the whole story, read at your own risk. In the midst of it all Greyson still took some pretty cute pics.
So today was the big day for me to hold Greyson. Unfortunately it was not the greatest day. We got to the hospital and learned Greyson did not have a great night. His blood gas report was not good but they said I could go ahead with the Kangaroo care. Well I held him for about half an hour when his oxygenation level fell (for the second time during me holding him). I asked the nurse if we should put him back in his isolete (we had talked about needing to do that if they dropped after the first time). She thought we should so we put him back in his isolete. Well that’s when his oxygenation level really fell. We’ve seen this before so at first it wasn’t that dramatic. She used the vent and gave him some extra oxygen and some manual breaths (you can do this by pushing a button on the vent). Well he didn’t respond and his saturation level continued to fall. This was soon followed by his heart rate. Greyson’s heartrate shouldn’t be below 120 beats per minute. As I watched the stats I saw his heart rate drop down to 43 before the monitor no longer recorded anything. Now Stacy and I were watching as they took out his vent tube and breathed for him through a bag. I’m not really sure why but none of the monitors that we usually look at read anything. By this time there were about 5 nurses close by and the neonatalogist was in. Soon some readings came back up on the monitors and they were in the normal range. The dr. said they would have to intubate him again (place a new tube down for the vent). We went and waited in the waiting room until it was done. The Dr. said it was obviously not a good situation, but does happen at times if the vent tube moves or gets blocked for some reason. All in all he felt it was not related to me holding him, or really anything but unfortunately is just one of those things that can happen with someone as small and fragile as Greyson is.
So he recovered pretty well from that except his blood pressure was running really low and when they took his blood sugar it was really high. They decided to give him his blood pressure shot early but ended up waiting to see what happened as his blood pressure was going up and down a lot.
So after lunch when we got back for his care Stacy changed his diaper and the nurse had done all the other stuff she does. One of those was to draw another blood gas. This one came back even higher than the one before it which meant it had gone from “bad we can live with” to “we need to do something”. This led to them changing him to a new vent known as the “jet vent” because it makes alot of noise. Basically it is a high frequency ventilator that keeps the lungs inflated and vibrates the air really fast which forces the oxygen in and the co2 out.
OK so Stacy and I finally went home to take her to the Dr. to get her infection looked at (still having some trouble with that, although getting better). when I called to hear how things were going I got a pretty good report. Greyson was on room air again (21 percent oxygen which is good) and his stats were all really good. His blood pressure was holding steady at a good level. His blood sugar was down to 126 which is good for him. His blood gass showed improvement so hopefully things will be OK now. There is no way to know at this point how long he will be on this vent, they said it could be a couple days or a couple weeks. Basically he will have to get weened off this one and put back on the other one and then weened off of that before he will be vent free.
So while it was very tramatic to Stacy and I, Greyson seemed to handle the whole day fairly well. He had some moments but recovered far quicker than we did. They tell us all the time that there will be good days and bad days, we are really praying for a lot more good days.