Two steps forward, one step back...

Hi all, today I got the chance to go in by myself today and be with Mia. It looks like yesterday and the first half of today have been kind of rough on her. For whatever reason, Mia's blood CO2 has been higher than it should be. In order to get it back down to where it should be they had to increase the ventilator settings quite a bit to get her stabilized. When I left the hospital today around 2pm Mia finally had a good CO2 reading and seemed to be doing better.

Since we were not there yesterday it's hard to say if there was anything significant that changed with Mia that started this. She did do a couple of sessions off of the ventilator yesterday but we were not around to see how they went. The doctors have decided to let Mia rest and stabilize before they try taking her off of the vent again for short periods.

One thing that Rachael and I have noticed is that it would seem that Mia is getting some gas in her stomach. We are wondering if this is causing more pressure on her lungs and making it uncomfortable for her to take deep breaths. The nurse Mercedes would vent the air out of her stomach after every feeding but we are not sure if this information got relayed to the other nurses overseeing her care.

One praise in all of this is that it would appear that Mia still has the drive to breath. It's hard to tell at the moment because the ventilator was turned up so much but it does not seem like she has relapsed on that aspect of it. Hopefully when they turn the vent settings back down she will pick up and do what she was doing before yesterday.

So today was one of those days that we sort of side stepped and didn't move forward much. Mia will have another CO2 measurement taken tonight and we are hopeful that it will be within acceptable limits. They will be taking this measurement around 8pm so I will add a short update sometime around then to let you all know what the result was.

Please continue to pray for Mia's strength. Each time her CO2 levels get out of whack it usually takes her a day or two to stabilize before she starts making more progress.

Robert