Evelina (Day 3)

Sunday 10th December

Grace had a fairly stable night and the doctors are quite encouraged by her progress. Mid morning they turned Grace back on her back but she tolerated this quite well and her oxygen saturation levels remained in the 80s and 90s. At 12.30 pm, the doctors changed the tube in Grace's throat to a nasal tube and made sure that the throat tube was the right size. Previously, the tube inserted at Guildford had been a little small and there had been some leakage of air around it, which obviously didn't help with maintaining the oxygen pressure inside Grace's lungs. This afternoon the doctors then put Grace back on a conventional ventilator and obviously we were really pleased and encouraged by this. Grace's saturation levels fell very slightly but the doctors were still content with these levels. In order to try to improve these levels as much as possible, they placed Grace back prone but then discovered, by looking at an X-ray taken earlier, that her tube needed to be moved further down into her wind-pipe / lungs, hence they needed to move her back to supine in order to do this. Clearly I am still very upset by everything that is going on but this just makes me angry and I feel that the nurses should have been more thorough in checking the X-ray results first. However, I don't want to criticise them as they have a very hard job and are working brilliantly to help my little girl.

Later the nurses sucked some secretions from Grace's lungs which were very thick and horrid. She doesn't generally respond well to the suctioning (which requires being off the ventilator and just being 'bagged' for short periods) and it takes a good few minutes for her oxygen saturations to recover after this procedure. By 6pm, her saturation levels are down to 78/79 from 90% concentrated oxygen, despite being placed back prone. The doctors are consequently considering perhaps putting Grace back on the oscillator. They have also received news from Guildford that Grace had a positive RSV test from some of her samples taken there. RSV is a severe cold virus that can cause significant lung infections in infants and could explain why Grace is so poorly and could also be the reason why another bug has affected her so badly. By 9pm though, Grace's levels were generally recovering and the doctors were just very carefully checking her blood gas tests for Co2 levels and lactic acid, etc., all of which would give an indication of whether Grace is still struggling to oxygenate her body. We stayed with Grace for most of today, read stories to her and just tried to remain positive throughout - which is hard but we are doing our best.