Making Progress!!

Gracie has taken big big steps for a little bit her size yesterday and today.

Tuesday:
Yesterday when we got to the hospital, they had weaned her oxygen level down to 55% and stopped giving her the morphine. They also started giving her versed and milirinone to help with the withdrawal symptoms. The echo cardiogram done on Monday looked really good with Gracie's heart functioning much better than before surgery. The doctors decided to leave the chest tube in for another couple of days just to make sure everything is going okay with that. Tuesday, they weaned down her oxygen level but wanted to leave the nitrous oxide alone to make sure that Gracie is tolerating it well.

Wednesday:
This morning, Gracie was at 40% oxygen and they turned down the nitrous oxide to 5 from 10 on Tuesday. They also gave her a trial hour to see how well she did breathing on her own and only having the ventilator on for backup support. Gracie passed that test with flying colors and her blood gas looked great afterwards, so they decided to give her another test this afternoon but for 2 hours. I talked to the nurse and she said that Gracie did great through the afternoon 2 hour trial and her blood gas looked good again.

SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO....the plan for tomorrow is to try and get Gracie off the vent and remove some of the other lines!!!!! Yeah!!!! They are not going to let her eat after 5am and will give her IV fluids until after they extubate her.

Gracie is very alert and just looks around. Sometimes it is very hard because you can tell she is crying and you can't pick her up, but hopefully really soon. If Gracie does okay with all that, they will watch her a couple of days in CVICU and then move her to the 15th floor for a few more days. This could mean we may be home around this time in 2 weeks!!!!! Keep hoping and praying that this will be the case!