Lightly Salted

Albert continues to make slow progress.

He has been semi conscious, slowly batting his eyelids at his mother, and seems to be coping well enough with the gradual changes in his medication. Though he has been coughing a little today he coped very well when they removed his endotracheal tube (his breathing tube) and replaced it with CPAP. Though the doctors would normally expect him to drop back a little directly after the switch, by the end of today he required even less oxygen (40%) than he had on the tube at the start of the day (50%)! This is a very positive sign. Another positive is that his wounds seem to have settled a little and lost most of their redness. There are no signs of infection, though the area around his drainage tubes is still very raw.

Today was another day of slow recovery.

I was out of Sydney overnight, giving a series of presentations in the Armidale Diocese. The priests there offered such intelligent and helpful questions and comments that they set me thinking along slightly different lines on my flight home. So engaged was I with my thoughts that I was surprised when the plane began to descend to land. It occurred to me that our attitude to Albert's days have been similar to a plane flight.

As the title of this post suggests, Albert has exhibited signs of slow but steady progress overnight and

throughout today. These first few days of recovery are when he is most fragile and vulnerable, so a slow and cautious approach is very appropriate.

As the pic indicates, Susie has several sick children at home at the moment with a flu-like respiratory bug.

"It went surprisingly well!"

Our surgeon's opening line in his post operation debrief made the top ten list of the most appreciated sentences in my life.

After a long session early this morning, in which I heard him recite a long list of possibilities, mostly involving

serious damage or death, I was asked to sign a form giving legal consent to the operation.

Albert is scheduled for surgery tomorrow.

Albert has been slowly improving each day. He is taking one hour stints off the CPAP three times a day, his lungs seem to be as clear as they have ever been, his numbers all look very good, and he is almost weaned off the last two sedatives (down to 0.5 each).

The good news is that Albert continues to improve, albeit very slowly. 

The doctors continue to wean him off the powerful sedatives that have kept him sleeping for a couple of weeks now. The sedatives are so potent that he was weaned off one of them and onto morphine, because morphine is less powerful! He is now only receiving small doses of the last of his original sedatives, along with a small dose of morphine to help with withdrawal from the others.

Albert is doing much better today.

He responded so well to the transition to CPAP on Sunday that the doctors pushed him to high flow nasal

prongs within the same 24 hours. We tried to convince them that Albert does not do swift changes but, as they reminded me, they are the medical professionals and we are just "worried parents" who need to trust them.

The story of today is Albert moving from an endotracheal tube (a tube down his nose into his lungs) to

CPAP (a form of oxygen mask forcing air up his nose). 

Because a machine was taking each breath for Albert, and because the tube had been resting in his breathing passages, the process was mildly traumatic. Albert's breathing process had to undergo a kick-start of sorts, which involved a lot of coughing, gurgling, struggling to breathe and frothing at the mouth.

The last 48 hours have been uneventful as far as emergencies are concerned. Albert has had none of the small heart and/or lung failure episodes that were common a few days ago and, even though his temperature has spiked a couple of times, his general health seems to have stabilised. Regular physiotherapy on his chest and tube suction have cleared his lungs a little and the additional infection, wherever it is, does not seem to be making his breathing any worse.