So what IS going on with Mira?

Well, we don't really know.

When we brought her into the ER Wednesday night, it was because her oxygen saturations were lower than we were comfortable with after a day of slimy secretions (with Mira's it's all about monitoring and taking care of her oral secretions. Coughing is her big business!) Usually we can bring her sats up with an extra neb, or a change of position, but they just weren't coming up.

As you know, they did an x-ray, drew some blood, and sent her home.

That next morning, her sats were even lower, and she was at one point floppy in the legs, which is absolutely NOT Mira. Her muscle tone is so high almost all of the time, and we'd never seen this. She wasn't blue or anything, but something was just not right.

So back we went, and that was when they saw the rapidly dropping blood pressure (which could be a sign of septic shock), and they rather quickly admitted her, and the doctors at Gillette said the x-ray from the night before, although it didn't look horrible, was definitely "cloudy" so they started her on antibiotics to treat for a mild pneumonia and kept waiting for the blood culture to come back.

By Friday, we had results on the culture, but the doctors working with her aren't quite sure how to interpret the results. There WAS bacterial growth in the blood culture, but of a type of bacteria that suggests a contaminated sample, which aligns with the fact that they had to do multiple pokes before getting a good one, which increases your chances of contamination. She's also not really showing any signs of a broadly systemic infection, but there was talk today of switching her antibiotic to more closely align with the susceptibilities of the culture, just in case.

She's been mostly calm and restful (with a few hiccups along the way that I won't detail) but when they tried this morning to take her off the bi-pap machine, her sats went right back down to the mid-80s.

So what's going on???

When she first went in Thursday, she was 90% of the time breathing ahead of the bi-pap (meaning - and here I am cringing a bit as I wonder if Adam or other people more skilled in the medical field are reading this laughing at my ineptitude! - that she was only needing a little bit of prompting to keep a good steady breathing rate going). Today, the bi-pap machine reports that the numbers have flip-flopped, and she's only initiating 10% of the time, and dependent on the machine for the rest.

We don't really have any idea what this means, or what's going on. I was just skimming back at old posts, though, and came across this one: A picture is worth a thousand words. It truly is amazing to me that this girl is alive, and even more so that we have been able to get inside a tiny bit and learn some of the things she likes, and are able to get to be her family for however long God gives us.