On her way to being a ventless model

Each day brings new changes for Sophia. Today she received the last dose of new respiratory medicine that she needed to have the doctors start weaning the Nitric she is on. She is now at less then 5% Nitric and in less then 36 hours she should be off of it entirely. This process will also spur the doctors to wean the Oxygen and also her sedation medicine. Our nurse thought that if everything went well Sophia could possibly be off the ventilator in a week or so. The Nurses are trying to be pro-active with feeding methods as well. Since Sophia has not dealt with the very minor amounts of feeds that she has received they are going to bypass her stomach for the time being, meaning simply that they are going to run a longer feeding tube to the beginning of her intestines and try to get her to absorb the food from there. The reason for this being that she is spitting up some of the food being placed in her stomach, when the ventilator comes out there would be a good chance that if she got sick that she could breath it into her lungs (this is called aspiration) and it would be very bad for her and would set her back a while. Placing the feeding tube in her intestine should stop her from getting sick thus allowing the respirator to safely be removed with out fear of aspiration. As she deals with things in a calmer manner they would try again to feed her through other methods.

As you can imagine after a major surgery and being sedated and on pain killers then having the pain killers removed and the sedation levels reduced, Sophia has becomes a little more agitated with her environment. Noise is a major source of aggravation for her and she sometimes gets unhappy now when the nurses assess her. With in the last week we have seen her try to cry a lot more, when her vent comes out we'll actually get to hear her cry. Although she is making the crying face, or squishy face as we call it, it doesn't mean she is in pain, a lot of the time she is just trying to let us and the nurse know that she is unhappy with whats going on.