We had our first trach-less scare, tonight. I have talked before about how Namine has always had intestinal troubles; well, tonight she was a whole lot of pain, trying to push something out. Couple that with dealing with her trach being gone, and you have a recipe for trouble. She’s sleeping soundly, if not a little raspily, now.
A couple things may have contributed to her trouble. Number one, we had spaghetti and sauce with some parmesan cheese; number two, we had homemade cinnabons for desert, with cream cheese frosting. Now, when Namine was younger, she seemed to be allergic to dairy. (In fact, she’d throw up every time she had any.) But she seemed to outgrow this; right before the trach was removed, Namine was able to eat cheesy things and didn’t even need to be suctioned. Even last night, Namine had pizza for dinner. Whether or not the dairy played a factor in all this, I don’t know. But we think we’ll stay away from dairy for a good long while.
When Namine started trying to poop and couldn’t, she started panicking. She breathed faster and faster, and she started having trouble breathing. Of course if she’d still had the trach, we would have changed it and everything would have been fine. But it was the most we could do to try and get her to calm down, to breathe easier, because she refused to let us put the ambu-bag’s mask over her face. Eventually, she did calm down, but she was still quite raspy for a while. So we let her stay up until we were satisfied that she was breathing easy enough to sleep.
And that’s how she is now – asleep. She fell asleep pretty much as soon as I lay her in bed. She’s breathing pretty easily, although her heart rate is up – about 115-120, where she’s normally at around 80-90. Her oxygen is fine, though, sitting at 89-91, nice and steady. Listening to her breathing, I can still hear that she has a rasp, but at least she seems to be breathing easily.
The one other thing that occurs to us is that Namine might have picked up a bug at the hospital. I hope this isn’t the case, but she has been sneezing quite a bit today, and she had a little bit of a runny nose this evening. Keep her in your prayers, as always.
The post has been sitting here at this point for about an hour or so, because Namine woke up crying. We called pulmonary, and after some discussion, we decided not to bring her in to the ER for the time being. Namine is once again asleep, but without any gauze covering her trach, thus making it easier for her to breathe. To paraphrase a Jedi, she must unlearn what she has learned. She needs to learn how to breathe out of her mouth and nose, not the stoma, because it is closing. She must also learn how to clear her throat, and not depend on us to suction her anymore; and how to cough anything up if she needs to. Being sick, or whatever’s going on with her right now, she’s having a little bit of trouble.
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