Update (8-5)

Lots happening today.  First of all, the good news.  She has weaned down on her bpm to 12.  She's real close to being able to get off of the ventilator.  She had a string of good gases last night, so a few more and we might get to hold her.  Also, they will quite possibly start to feed her today.  She has stopped producing such dark green bile and is only producing very small, light green liquid. This means that she is dealing with her situation well.  They will start with very small doses of pedialite (we have no idea how to spell it, so it's phonetic) which is a nutrition that is easily run through the body.  If she handles that well, with no vomiting (which we're afraid would also cause trauma to her patch) then they would slowly introduce breast milk to her.  They took out her nose tube and put in a new one for feeding when we were there.  They are planning on waiting for four hours to see if she vomits.  If not, around five o'clock they will give her a little Pedialite. Finally the pain medicine has seemed to keep her very calm throughout the day.  While this didn't stop her from throwing an all out temper fest when her nose tube was put in, it has been much easier to calm her and the rest of the time when she is not being messed with, she is quite comfortable.

The concerning news:  Her rip is still a cause for concern.  We were able to briefly meet with Dr. Saenz today and he said basically the same thing as Dr. Losasso said yesterday night, which is that it seems to be looking okay for now as long as NOTHING else goes wrong.  If so, it is a trip to the O.R. and a new sewing of the patch.  The granulation that we are seeing is basically a scab over the liver, so the liver is kind of exposed with the skin matrix over it.  This is obviously much better than the actual liver being exposed and it is extremely reassuring that she is stooling because that means that while things are exposed, the bowels are still working properly.  If we can get through a few more days of not having to restitch anything, we hope that the scab will become hard and tough enough for it to be less of a worry.  But for now, it is. Also, the doctors are going to start to wean her off of the pain medication.  While we understand this is necessary and a good thing, we definitely don't want to be back where we were before she was prescribed where we felt like there was a "wait and see" policy for three days.  We hope she still takes to the smaller doses of medicine so we don't have to worry about it.  

We plan to put up a picture soon of her exposed patch just for our records.  If gross-looking goopy wounds bother you, you might want to pay attention to the post title before scrolling down too fast.  Hopefully tonight's post will have some feeding information on it as well as some pictures of us holding her again.