Update on Kennedy

Yesterday was one of the hardest days of my life.  I got to the hospital at about 9:30 and at this point Kennedy was on an oscillator ventilator.  This ventilator works with vibrations so when I saw her for the first time yesterday she was just laying in her incubator hooked up to even more tubes and wires and her entire little body was vibrating.  I completely lost it. To see her this way was just so hard and so sad. I spoke with the Dr and they filled me in about her deflated lung and all the other tests they were doing to see what was going on with her. For now it was just a waiting game so I sat with her, held her hand and just talked to her. I was a complete mess. I had nurses and social workers coming into the room checking on me to see if I was ok. It is just heartbreaking.

I went to get some lunch and when I came back into her room I almost passed out.  5 Dr's were in there, the roof to her incubator was up and one of the Dr's was bagging air into her lungs instead of being on the vent. They told me she wasn't doing well on the oscillator so they took her off and have been bagging her for about 20 minutes. Her stats seemed to improve so they were going to hook her up to the conventional ventilator. She obviously didn't like the constant vibrating any more than I did!

They finally got her hooked up to the new vent and ran blood gasses every 20 minutes. This test measures the acidity and the levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the blood. It's used to check how well her lungs are able to move oxygen into the blood and remove carbon dioxide from the blood. They were coming back very well on the new vent. At one point her numbers sky rocketed and the Dr said that was the sign that her right lung had inflated again and they had to readjust her numbers and bring all her levels down.

After that she seemed to be doing better.  At this point Arthur was there and she was opening her eyes and looking around.  I had asked the sister that was in the hospital to come up and say a prayer with us. She met Kennedy and we said a prayer for her to get stronger and continue to fight. By the time I left the hospital her numbers looked ok and she looked much better.  We just needed her to have a good night with no set backs.

I called her nurse this morning and she said she had a relatively good night. Her oxygen levels are down and blood gasses look good. She did have one really low episode but they came in, bagged her for 2 minutes and she bounced right back. The nurse also said that the preliminary results from her blood culture came back and there is a little infection there.  They need to wait for the final results to see exactly what it is but they have her on 3 antibiotics in the meantime.  Not the best news but at least now we know that she definitely does have something going on and that's what's causing all this.

Thank you all for your continuous thoughts and prayers! Kennedy has a lot of love coming her way. She isn't out of the woods yet but she's definitely in a better position than she was yesterday!