I hope I'm not causing permanent damage to anyone's psyches by postponing these daily updates until the wee hours of the morning. Hopefully you can just pretend that last night's update (at 3:28am) applies to most of today as well. If not, at least try not to lose any sleep hitting the Refresh button, because I can't guarantee any times for posting.
Today was overall a pretty good day. Yesterday's trend of a decrease in ventilator amplitude and increase in oxygen percentage continued, causing us some concern when we visited this afternoon. Turning down the vent is great, but we were concerned that his oxygen was getting too high (in the high 60's and low 70's). There's no danger inherent in that level, but it also gives less cushion room if he happens to have trouble....obviously you can't get any higher than 100% oxygen. However, they felt they needed to keep the levels up because his blood oxygen was hovering around 90 (out of 100)....they'd like to keep it between 95 and 100.
As of this evening, things are looking much better. They have been able to keep the ventilator amplitude down, and also decrease his oxygen percentage to 53.....that provides a lot more cushion room in case he gets upset. Even at this level, his blood oxygen saturation was in the mid- to high-90's (better than earlier). He's resting comfortably, his CO2 levels are "within parameters," and everything looks pretty stable. They're moving him around occasionally to prevent too much edema (extra fluid) from building up in one location, but making sure to sedate him before handling him too much.
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