Day 20: Frankie Fabulous Fightin' Hard

The poor boy is having a tough time with breathing. He isn't really on any drugs tonight, but he is worn out from trying to breath. He had morphine around 2 but no gas drops. The doctors don't think those work, but then all the nurses with children swear by them. We prefer him not to be on anything, but we also do want him to suffer. Frankie No Freckles does what everyone refers to as grunting. Not like Tim Taylor, like he is fighting for air. They have him up to 5 liters at 50% mix. Room air is 21% oxygen. He can get up to 6 liters before they to use a ventilator. His oxygen saturation is good, his heart rate is a little high, but nothing to be concerned with, and his breaths per minute are in the 70s. The breaths per minute are high, but normal for him and he has seemed comfortable at this number. The reason they are upping his oxygen is based on the blood work they do. His carbon dioxide levels in his blood are too high. They seem to plateau. He is not processing the oxygen well enough. His kidneys are supposedly offsetting this. He needs to grow in size to overcome this but he is burning all his calories breathing. Frankie Fiddle is back on antibiotics for 48 hours while they grow his cultures to see if he has an infection. Earlier he sounded like he was gargling so to help clear his throat, we propped him up in his boppy. This really seemed to work, but as you can see, it's really a lot of work to move that belly while he breaths. Frankie For Fun just started making some noise, so I took a minute from typing this to cuddled up with him. He really seemed to like it. Now Alex is taking a turn. They upped his feed to 17 cc an hour. They base it all off of calories per weight. He should be at around 21-22cc an hour. So he is not too terribly far off.  This whole nicu thing is a roller coaster. He doesn't really seem that uncomfortable, so hopefully they don't dope him up after we leave. As for Alex and I, we went had grabbed a bite to eat at a cafe/bakery that my mother gave us a groupon for. I don't remember the name of the place, but it was obvious why they had a groupon that was buy $35 and get $25 off. Not so good. Other than that, we watched some TV on the laptop, including watching the last 2 episodes of Two and a Half Men. Terrible show now. The only funny thing is the kid. They should have made him inherit Charlie's money and wrote the show around that.