Diagnosis: Pneumonia

It all started last week, when Heather and I were visiting Carson. Heather noticed it before I did that Carson was requiring to be suctioned more often. He’d been having more and more of the bradycardia spells; many of them being so severe that his oxygen saturations were dropping below 60 percent. This past Sunday it culminated when Heather was holding Carson and he had another spell. He got a mucus plug, likely at the end of his trach tube, down inside his throat. His heart rate dropped and his oxygen sats dropped to 20 percent. The nurses had to take Carson from Heather’s arms and put him back in his bed to suction him. They tried and tried and they couldn’t get the plug to come out. Heather said she was ready to pull out the trach and put a new one in (Good thing she’s trained!). The nurses finally got the mucus plug out and everything returned to normal; his normal.

This all prompted Heather to again be the advocate for Carson, a new role that she’s been filling quite well. She asked the nurses if they had run any tests to see if Carson had an infection, since last time this happened he did have something infection related going on. They ran the blood tests and it came back that he had a high white blood cell count. This caused them to test the secretions from his lungs and that’s where they found the bacteria; it tested positive for pneumonia. Good thing Heather asked, considering that it’s been a week so far that all of this has been brewing.

So, they have reinserted his picc line, put him back on the ventilator, and are going to do another lumbar puncture to check for infection in his spine. They have him back on the antibiotics also. Heather said that they are going to talk with ENT to see if they can increase the size of Carson’s trach. Right now, his trach is size 3, but they want to get something bigger because the secretions from his lungs are very thick and they have a hard time getting those sucked out through the small tube. He also has a possible infection around the site of his G-tube; the one that goes to his stomach, the skin is very red.

So we’re hanging in there. This is all very hard to go through and understand, but we know that God is faithful and already knows the outcome of all of this. We’ll just cling to that.