1-19

We just called to check on the girls (came home to sleep a little) and the doctors had just rounded.  For those of you who get bogged down in medical jargon, Lydia is doing ok and Penny is still having a hard time but is doing better in a few areas.  A little more specifically, Lydia is having a few more desats than she has been so they are increasing her caffeine to help with that.  We could have told them than Chus need more caffeine to function!  Her feeds are back up to where she was tolerating them at 6cc each hour for 3 hours.  She was still being stingy with her little poo so she got another suppository (that was fun) and responded appropriately.  Good girl Lydia.

Penny is still having a tough time.  She got a blood transfusion and dopamine (to help her kidney get more blood and function better) and her urine output went up.  This is good because she's been pretty swollen the past few days.  This morning her blood pressure was down as well so they took another CRP (not sure what that stands for) and it was elevated.  This just shows that there is inflammation somewhere but they take it to mean that she has another infection.  This would be a second one that is not responding to the antibiotics she was on (vancomycin) so she's going on a stronger one (meropenem) while we wait for the cultures to grow so we can see exactly what kind of infection this is.  In other news, her CO2 is lower than it's been (49...it was in the high 60s) and her PH is closer to normal (7.2...7.35-7.45 is good) so Good girl Penny!  They spent the evening tweaking (their word not mine) the settings on the oscillator to help her exhale the CO2 her body has been building up.  Having too much CO2 can apparently make the blood acidic....I think.

Ok, that's all I think I understand and if we get more information I'll let you guys know.  All I have to say is...."wwwweeeeeeeeeeeeeee" (get it? roller coaster?...oh well)