PICU ups and downs

Jessica had a nice quiet night on PICU staying on the ventilator and everything remained stable overnight. A chest X-ray in the morning showed that her left lung had re-inflated and so she came off the ventilator again and went back on to optiflow oxygen. However, her temperature was a bit high during the morning and she needed to be suctioned fairly frequently as there were quite a lot of secretions on her chest and so a sample was sent off to the lab to check for infection, although in the meantime, Jessica was already on antibiotics.

The sample came back positive for paraflu, a cold/flu-type virus, which we suspect was shared by Louise who has had a fairly heavy cold over the last week or so. Thankfully though, Jessica’s temperature has now come back down and whilst she still needs to have regular suctioning to remove the secretions, she doesn’t seem to be too unwell as a result of this and hopefully this will continue to be the case. It did mean that we had a little move across PICU into a single bay in the corner though.

Jessica has also had one of her chest drains removed today and had some time out of the cot having a lovely cuddle with Mummy which was great. She has been a little more awake today and starting to show a little interest in what is going on around her so seems to be feeling a little better than she has been. She is also off the morphine and seems much more settled generally.