We had our planning meeting today with the doctors. Brendan’s new plan is to challenge him on breathing over the weekend, trying to wean the cpap support. If he can not make dramatic improvement enough to convince the doctors that he can get off the cpap, then he will get his tracheostomy next week.
The pulmonologist believes that he needs to get a lot bigger for his lungs to have a chance to grow new tissue and get stronger. Her point of view is that the trach is a good thing for him and will provide a stable and secure airway and a reliable means of providing some pressure support without harming his face and requiring so much sedative.
The cardiologist does not feel like it will do him any good to go back to the cath lab, but if they are going to do anything that requires anesthesia like the trach, then they would like another CT to be done.
The surgeon did not really have any input, other than that he wants to see one surgery done at a time. He does not feel that doing a g-tube at the same time as the trach is a good idea. A g-tube would be a port in his belly for feeding that would allow the ND tube to come out of his nose.

They are going to start a new drug tonight to give Brendan a bit of work to do. His little body is countering his low oxygen/high co2 levels in his blood by keeping bicarbonate levels high in order to buffer the blood and protect it from becoming acidic. The new drug will reduce the bicarb levels slightly and ideally Brendan would breathe to rebalance the blood. How he reacts to this is going to be a big part of knowing if he is going to be able to get off the breathing support.

I only took one picture today of Brendan, it is a lot like the last few days. He didn’t really change much, he didn’t have awake time while we were there. He does have another new animal toy in his bed, hopefully he will be able to enjoy it soon.

Trevor had too many pictures to choose from, he is even cute making camera face.