March
2008
No news is no news0
There isn’t much to report at the moment. We are still in the PICU. Dorrie has made some progress with weaning off of everything she was on — the sedatives, the hydrocortisone and the vent. The ENT has changed out her trach once, which means it’s now cleared to have people other than him do it.
I finally got to hold her today for the third time since we got here (and the first time in a month.) The morphine is messing with her poor little GI tract the same way it did last time, giving her a hard time getting the poops out and making her fairly uncomfortable. It’s so difficult to help her now that she can’t make noise; you have to actually be looking at her to even realize that she’s upset, unless she manages to get upset enough to make an alarm go off.
Her O2 has been steady at 40% for quite some time now and is a relatively good measure while they try and wean other settings. I was absent for much of the weekend, as I had to work all day on Saturday and slept in/overslept on Sunday, and at rounds today it was discovered that pretty much nothing had been done all weekend with respect to weaning… anything. She was still on the same morphine and ativan as she had been on Friday. The NP who had been here Friday and I couldn’t figure out what the heck had happened, except that it appeared that the nurses totally slacked off all weekend and failed to keep any withdrawal scores. I am rather irritated that we’ve lost two days of weaning and could be that much closer to being done with this crap, but there’s not much that can be done about it now. I have no opinion of last night’s nurse, who apparently not only did not take down withdrawal scores but, even more annoyingly, came up with ridiculous measurements and didn’t bother to check and see if they made the least bit of sense. I rather doubt that Dorrie has shrunk 3″ in this past week.
Today she had a visit from the therapist from the ICN who is covering PICU this week while the normal therapist is on vacation. She had a good time sitting up and moving around and seemed to really enjoy being stretched and rotated. I’m sure she’s pretty darn sick of the crib and being on her back. She had a good nurse Friday who found her a baby sized hospital gown to wear, so she’s been partially dressed now for a few days, rather than just lying around in her diaper. If she behaves herself over the next few days, I may have some luck getting them to let us put her in clothes.