Titus had a rough night on the vent. He kept de-SATing every hour - but at around 3am starting to de-SAT every 10 minutes. Let me explain what a de-SAT is from a layman's perspective (or laymom's perspective as Becky states).
When we breathe, we take in oxygen into our lungs which gets carried through our bodies and comes back into our lungs as Carbon Dioxide (CO2) that is exhaled. Most of us maintain an oxygen saturation of 100% through our normal breathing and sleep. When your oxygen saturation drops below a certain percent, it means that oxygen is not being carried to all parts of the body. The lower it drops, the less your body is getting the oxygen it needs. Because of Titus breathing issues, we always have him on oxygen through his nasal canula and the oxygen he receives supplements his breathing to keep his SATs up. At night, Titus sleeps with a pulseoximeter attached to his foot which measures his heart rate and oxygen saturation. When the SATs drop below 90%, the alarms go off. Many times, Titus drops to the low 80's for a few seconds and then he brings himself back up or we wake him up a bit and his breathing kicks back in.
With that being stated, last night, Titus was deSATing down to the low 30's and 20's. A few times he went down to 6. Each time, a team of 4 nurses would come rushing in and begin to bag him to keep him breathing and get his SATs back up.
Generally when Titus is on a ventilator (which is a tube running down to lungs that is breathing for him - or assisting his breathing depending on how low the settings are), he fights the vents and will do his bronchial spasms. When he spasms, his lungs clamp down and he just stops breathing and turns a nice shade of blue.
By taking him off the vent, it should stop the bronchial spasms (since it has in the past) and they can wean him off sedation which will wake him back up. Our prayer this morning is that weaning him off will go smoothly and that he will maintain. The sooner he is off the vent and sedation, the sooner he returns to a normal state, the sooner we can be released and get home.
I will keep the blog and facebook updated throughout the day.
Becky and I so appreciate the prayers and emails over the last day. We both got some sleep last night even with all the hustle/bustle going on in his room (they also have a sleeping room that we alternated sleeping in). But as we talked about this morning, we could feel the peace overcome us last night. The song "somebody's praying, I can feel it. Somebody's praying for me" keeps rolling through my head. It is a comfort to know people are praying for Titus and for us.
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