Another Chest Tube

Hi Everyone,

Eric had a good night last night, which means I was able to get a good night's sleep. :) They were able to completely ween him off of the blood pressure medicine (which is wonderful!!) and lower the ventilator settings to 35%. This is lower than it has been since before Christmas! Another thing of note (at least to me) is that they replaced his central line yesterday to help prevent infection and replaced it with a COOK catheter! I've been waiting 5 weeks to see one of our products being used. I KNOW he'll get better now! :)

They also noticed another small pneumothorax on his right side this morning. They placed a chest tube on his right side, so he'll have matching scars. Both of the pneumothoraxes were pretty small and have stopped releasing air, so that is good. I'd rather have a small hole that a big one. They'll leave these tubes in until he comes off the ventilator, but no one is concerned about them. We're still waiting to hear from the Ear, Nose and Throat docs about scheduling a tracheotomy. I think everyone is in favor of doing this. It will be more comfortable for him, reduce the chance of scar tissue forming in this throat, and it should be easier to ween him off of the ventilator. Though he is getting close to being able to breathe on his own, it seems like his lungs are very sensitive to ANY changes in his body. This is basically what happened the other night. He had a fever, and it threw his whole body out of whack. It resulted in causing his lungs to not work correctly. I would hate to put him through the trauma of waking up with tubes down his throat only to have to put them back in immediately. With a trache tube, you can unhook the ventilator and hook it back up really easily. Once he is a bit stronger, they'll be able to take it out and let the hole heal.

As for other good news, his white blood cells went down again today to 19,000. This is still on the high side, but it might indicate that the earlier increase was in response to the infection/fever he had the other night, and not from the leukemia. These cells are all still normal, as well. This is all very reassuring to us, even if we have not heard results from the tests on remission.

Until later,
Melissa