A bumpy ride…and its not over yet.

OK so I’m behind in updating yet again. Someone should dock my pay. Or maybe start paying me….one of those would surely help!
So here is the update. Friday they took Greyson into the OR to take a look at things. The plan was to go in and look, then bring him back to the PICU (Pediatric Intensive Care Unit) on a ventilator. Well as it turned out they took a look and brought him back to the PICU without the ventilator. They ended up putting him on a really fancy bi-pap machine to help him breath. After being on that for a short time his oxygen saturation fell and they were having a hard time getting them back up. They were finally able to get them up and I was able to head to Bremerton for our children’s ministry movie night. As I left the movie night to come back to Tacoma I got a phone call from the hospital telling me they had to put him back on the ventilator. The reason for this was that he was not awake enough to breath on his own.
Normally this might not have been such a big deal, but they had discontinued the medicine to paralyze him so it was a bit of a mystery. Well things got pretty bad that night. I arrived at the hospital around midnight and he was struggling to keep his oxygen level above 88 percent, even though he was on 80 percent oxygen. I talked to the RT and was telling her, and primarily Greyson, that this was not going to cut it. The RT told me that while she agreed that we would like to see Greyson do better, earlier he had been on 100 percent oxygen and was struggling to keep his sats above 78 percent, so I should cut Greyson a little slack since he was moving in the right direction. We also learned the next morning that his co2 level had climbed to 120 (this number, you may recall from forever ago, should stay below 60 (35-40 is a good number).
OK so finally he got his level up to 90 percent and I went to the parent apartment to give Stacy some medicine (she’s been a bit sick). We went to sleep and called around 7:15AM to hear how things were going. Things were better and they told us they were talking about extubating him (taking him off the ventilator). Whoa….I rushed over to the hospital (Stacy stayed away to make sure she was not going to spread anything to him) and right after I was there they did extubate him. Yesterday he was very sleepy and weak but only required around 2 liters of oxygen.
Today (Sunday) he came off oxygen and was transferred to a regular room, out of intensive care! He is still not himself but is getting more alert and stronger all the time.
Apparently what happened on Friday was the paralytic drug they had been giving him all week was still built up in his system and while they had DC’d it (discontinued) earlier in the day it was still seeping into his system as his body worked to metabolize it all. Then when they took him to the OR they had to sedate him for that. This all became too much for him and he was unable to breath until they put him back on the ventilator. At that point he was doing so poorly that it took awhile for everything to get going again.
So he made it through everything and is breathing really pretty well. We are a little concerned he may be suffering some withdrawals from the medicines and they are working to figure out what we should give him and how to do that to make sure we don’t create any new issues, while helping him as he gets these drugs out of his system.
Now for the bad/scary part. Greyson’s vocal cords have not been moving like they should when they went in to look. This could be explained by a lot of things but even now he cannot make any noise. It would appear that his vocal cords are paralyzed. The question now is whether this will be permanent or is just a temporary consequence of all that has happened this week. Please pray with us that God will touch his cords and restore his beautiful little voice so that he can use it to proclaim how great our God is.
Well I guess that is about it for now. Since the news about his vocal cords is depressing, (we know God is not suprised by this and is still at work, but it is still VERY VERY hard for his parents) we will include a video from before surgery as encouragement. This video was taken in June and shows that even finger foods are better with utensils!!