Kiera saw her shadow...6 more weeks of summer for her... Mama needs a spa day.

Doctors are predicting a slow recovery for Kiera and think it may take anywhere from 6 weeks to 3 months for her to get back home. She is currently still sedated, having trouble with blood pressure control and high glucose levels, and still on the ventilator doing none of her own breathing. The assumption is that she has some muscle myopathy from 2 weeks of sedatives and paralytics and is too weak to breathe on her own just yet. They went UP on her ventilator rate today to try to help her breathe off some of the high CO2 levels. The positive aspect of the increase is that at least her lungs are a little less hyperinflated enough to actually do that. Before, they couldn't risk a higher rate. Of course, more support versus less support isn't exactly a green light.

They are starting to ween her fentanyl a little, so she peeked at mommy and daddy a little through very heavy lids this evening and squeezed my hand. She is very drugged though and out of it.  She is only getting a tiny 10cc's per/hr continuous of formula, and her gutt is starting to move gas and other. No real stool yet except a tiny smear last night. Her other drugs to control blood pressure and glucose end up getting increased and decreased routinely as needed, so no real progress there.

I don't really know any other way to say this, but this sucks. Her last hospitalization of more than 2 weeks was for a month in March 2009 with Influenza A and a collapsed lung(see previous blog posts)...BUT I wasn't trying to hold a teaching job then, OR take classes for grad school. In addition, she was already ON a ventilator when we admitted her then, so this is a much more dramatic shift in her status than before. If this takes even the low estimate of 6 weeks from now that pulmo suggests, that will make this a 9 week hospital stay...the result of just a very bad common cold.

So tomorrow, I head to the hospital again and again until my family is home. I'm losing steam, but hoping that Kiera will once again surprise everybody and come home sooner rather than later.