Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Making Progress

Hope with Great Grandma Anderson

Hope & Aunt Emily

All healed up


Hope has had a wonderful couple of weeks. As you can see from the picture, the incision from her surgery has healed to the point you can hardly even see it. She saw the surgeon at U of M last week and he was very happy with how it all looks. The big activation day is just a couple weeks away now!

Hope has also made great progress on the ventilator. At her appointment with the pulmonologist we put together a plan to begin weaning Hope's ventilator settings on a regular basis. On this wean we took her rate from 31 breaths per minute down to 29. She has done very well with it and if she continues to do so, we will lower the rate by 2 every two weeks. After she reaches a rate of 21 we will begin to lower the PEEP (the amount of pressure that the vent gives her continuously to keep her airway open).

Hope is also now on less oxygen. She has done great with that as well. In addition to ALL of this Hope is now getting only 2 breathing treatments each day. This makes her very happy because she really doesn't like getting the breathing treatments.

All of these changes are little steps towards getting Hope off of the ventilator - which goes without saying, would be WONDERFUL!!

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