A quick stay on PICU

It was such a relief to finally be able to go and see Jessica on PICU after her surgery yesterday. As always, things were a little up and down for the first few hours but Jessica seemed to be doing very well. Later in the evening, when she was waking up a little and no doubt finding the ventilator irritating, she decided to extubate herself which caused a bit of drama as her sats dropped down to 28 whilst the team were rushing to ventilate her with a bag and mask! Thankfully though, once she was having oxygen again, all was fine and the team on PICU decided that as she was managing to breathe for herself with optiflow oxygen given through nasal specs, she didn’t need to have the ventilator put back in!

Having woken up thoroughly by late evening, it looked like the night staff were going to be in for a long night as Jessica was very, very restless and much more aware of all the drains and tubes that were coming out of her than she had been the last time, which was making her very cross. She was clearly quite tired but the attempts to try and soothe her were only partially successful. She eventually managed an hour here and there of drug-induced sleep but by morning, her little eyes were very red from all the constant rubbing making her look a little like a panda.

We discovered during the morning that slipping an arm under her head to make her feel like she was being cuddled worked really well to settle her and by the afternoon she was much more settled. Her central line was removed and as things were stable, the team on PICU were happy for her to be transferred up to Ocean Ward by evening which was much sooner than we had anticipated – well done Jessica!

However, it seems that the chylothorax (the leaky lymphatic duct) which she had after the last surgery has returned once again which is a bit of a shame. It means that Jessica has to have Monogen again rather than breast milk and so Louise is back to expressing in the hope that Jessica can go back to mummy milk at some point in the future. On the plus side, so far she has been taking this by bottle and we are hoping that she will continue to do so and that her feeding tube can be removed sooner rather than later.

At present, she still has several chest drains in place and is on morphine but is much more settled than she was last night so hopefully she will have a better night tonight. Her observations have been fairly stable and she seems to be doing well – let’s hope this continues to be the case!