Evelina

Friday 8th December

Having drained around 110ml of fluid from around Grace's right lung, the Evelina retrieval team took myself and a sedated, muscle-relaxed, Gracie - now breathing via a ventilator - to the Evelina Children's Unit at St Thomas' hospital near Waterloo in London. The hospital is very modern and not like anything I have seen before. The equipment is all ultra-modern but I think anything would scare me at this stage as I still can't believe that my little girl is in a paediatric intensive care unit. We arrived at about 8pm and the doctors immediately assessed Grace and put her on a 'conventional' ventilator. Gracie is now needing 100% concentrated oxygen and still only saturating to levels in the 80s (normally, we all breathe air containing only 20% oxygen and our lungs saturate that oxygen into our blood at levels of 98 -100%). The doctors put in a femeral line for Grace's drugs and she has been put on morphine and clonadine (for pain and sedation), is still receiving fluids and is muscle-relaxed. We keep talking to Grace though, as all the nurses do, as she can almost certainly still hear us despite not being able to respond. The doctors also do X-rays which show that Grace's lungs are very cloudy and not functioning properly at all. Later in the evening, the doctors tried to replace Grace's mouth tube (inserted in Guildford right before the transfer) with a nasal tube but her oxygen saturations fell very low and so they decided against this for tonight. Grace's Daddy took her Granny home and I was given a bed on a ward upstairs from the paediatric ICU. I hardly slept though and went downstairs very early in the morning to see that Grace was still stable and whether she was awake. I am so, so scared and can't stop panicking and crying - each time I walk in the ICU I feel as though my heart is being squeezed and I can't breathe properly until I see that she is OK and the nurses tell me that she is stable. I just can't lose my Gracie.