10.21.21 ICU 30

Not a lot of progress today overall. Aimee is tolerating the new vent, though it looks like the settings will still need a few more days of tweaking to get them figured out. She has some loss of lung capacity from the transition putting her at less pressure than she should be. Different machines have different software and they don’t directly correlate. They plan to spend the next several days make adjustments to her settings here in the ICU. In the mean time she is needing some additional respiratory clearance. 

GI wise, she hasn’t been vomiting much, but this afternoon and evening her stomach has started to become distended again. She has remained on NG suction most of the day. No progress there. Her wound continues to be packed twice a day and is making slow healing progress. 

Since she can’t use her digestive system currently, all of her meds have had to be given by IV over this past few weeks. One of the difficulties with this is that many of her regular medications do not have an IV form. Neither of her seizure meds do. So they have her on a different medication that is very effective for her type of epilepsy. The downside is that it is difficult to regulate the dose. Despite having been at a good level several days ago, today when they took bloodwork it was nearly undetectable. They had to give her a large loading bolus and then raise her dose by 50% more. This has helped to alleviate some of the neuro symptoms, particularly the full body clonus type movements, we had been seeing over the past two days.  

The wonderful news of the day was for me. I was able to go outside for a walk. We had the same day nurse for the last 4 days and her second patient was discharged from ICU today. She stayed directly with Aimee and I walked up the road to the trail. It was such a restorative act to walk through the snowing leaves of autumn.