This is an update to last week’s New Pulse Ox and Another Illness post.
Monday, the 14th, James was still working his way back to normal…slowly, but surely. Stacy had him on somewhere between 1/8 and ¼ liter of oxygen. His sats were a little wonky; he would be at 86 one minute, and 96 the next. For those of you that don’t know what sats are, it’s basically the oxygen saturation levels (in percent) in the blood. James is hooked up to a pulse oximeter (aka pulse ox) 24/7 that reads his sats and heartrate. The highest sat reading is 100, which is 100% oxygen saturation. This is the perfect number. For James, anything in the 90s is acceptable. His pulse ox alarm goes off when his sats drop to 86 or below.
Since James was feeling so much better, Stacy tried to give him a little bit of food on Monday afternoon for the first time in about a week. His normal feeding rate is 240ml over an hour. Stacy set his feeding pump to 200ml over 2 hours; a slower feed to see how he handled it.
Tuesday Stacy tried taking James off the oxygen for a little bit. Being that he was only on a minimal amount of oxygen, she figured that it was almost like he wasn’t getting anything anyway. He was off of oxygen for a few hours, but just seemed to need just that little bit to keep his sats up, so she put it back on. She’s also been increasing his feeds a bit. He normally gets 4 cans of formula a day. Yesterday he seemed to handle one can without issue so Tuesday she upped it to two cans.
I mentioned in the previous illness post that we lost nursing. When James came home from the NICU in October of 2009, he was given palliative care through a local nonprofit which included a nurse that would stop by every couple of weeks to check up on him. Since he was doing so well and staying healthy, they notified us in March that he would be losing nursing care. They called Stacy two weeks ago that he was officially dropped from nursing. And of course, James got sick a week later. Stacy called them on Wednesday to plead her (or James’) case to put him back on nursing and they said yes! They even sent over a nurse that same day to assess James. She said that he sounded tight, almost asthmatic. She recommended to add more breathing treatments to see if those would help loosen up whatever gunk was lodged in his throat. Stacy started doing breathing treatments every two hours.
In addition to returning James to nursing, they wanted us to switch from the company that currently handled James’ home health equipment and supplies to the company that they use to make things easier. This new company sent over eight small oxygen tanks—three medium sized tanks, and one absolutely HUGE tank—and an oxygen concentrator on Wednesday. They will eventually send over all of the other equipment that James currently uses (pulse ox, feeding pump, suction machine, etc.) so that we can return the equipment to our current home health company.
Thursday James was off of oxygen. His sats were still bouncing around a bit, but remained in the high 80s, and low 90s. Stacy said that he seemed to be breathing fine one minute, and the next he was stuffy.
On Friday, Stacy called the pediatrician to give him an update on James. James had recently finished a round of antibiotics, but since he still seemed to be fighting something, the doc prescribed another antibiotic for ten days.
Yesterday we took a family trip to the dentist to get our toofers checked. Nothing major to report. The dentist said James’ teeth looked good and just needs a cleaning in May with the rest of us.
