Today was a piece of cake!! I had some little drinks with umbrellas and put my feet up, and TREVOR did all the work for me!

He got in the mail and supervised the collection of the garbage

He moved out all of the oxygen tanks for refills

He moved Brendan’s crib out and swept up all the dog hair

He cleaned the counters

He took care of Brendan

He kept Brendan’s wires all untangled

He cooked dinner and fed himself some mashed potatoes

Brendan says, “If you believe all that malarkey, I have a bridge to sell you”

“I am outta here”

Truth is, we were all very busy today and Nurse Jen was here taking great care of Brendan. We had a bit of a scare last night as Brendan’s sats continued to drop. But some vigorous CPT (patting chest) and holding him upright and he finally slept deep enough to allow the vent to do its job. He fights it otherwise. His numbers recovered enough that we stopped thinking we were about to head to the ER.

He still had crappy numbers today, but you wouldn’t know it if the oximeter was turned off. He rocked PT today, played, laughed, climbed and threw up a lot less. He had some OT fun too. We go to see the pediatrician tomorrow for his 18mo checkup and follow up on this illness.
The pulmonologist has ordered ventilator during naps and overnight until we see her again on the 24th, and she prescribed a steroid burst for 5 days to help his immune system battle this infection. He still gets breathing treatments and antibiotic.
Once again, we all miss hearing his voice. We hate obsessing about those little glowing numbers on the oximeter and staring at them with all of the power of our wills to get those numbers to improve.

Brendan showed improvement today. He was more interested in playing, he crawled all around the room. He laughed at his brother. His numbers are still bad, but this is kind of how it went last time too. A few more days and he should be better. We are already scheduled for the 18month checkup with the pediatrician on Wednesday, and he will be ordering a follow up chest xray to check out a suspicious spot and make sure everything is healing properly.
He still has lots of dripping and drainage and it makes him throw up, especially when he gets up from sleeping. I am not coping with the vomit well, Bill has been a hero helping in that aspect.
No matter what I try to do, he always seems to deliberately barf right down my shirt.

It was Sort and Sanitize day, our game of Inventory Undo with extra cleaning.

Brendan loves his “thumb trap” toy

What you are seeing on the floor is a puddle of stomach bile, formula, and mucus. Brendan managed to open the medicine port on his feeding tube and so the contents of his stomach slowly back up and leak out. He was more than happy to swish his feet and splash in it and spread it around. (hence the sort and sanitize day)

Brendan hides out in the toy box. He tried to climb in all by himself.

After work, Bill did some work outside and cleaned up all the tools and debris on the patio. The boys were highly interested.

They love the Daddy time they get in the evening. Trevor even runs to him and says “Daaa”.

Tomorrow is busy Tuesday with PT, OT and oxygen refill. I am sure they will go easy on Brendan.

It was another hard day for Brendan. It really pains me to see him feel so bad. He just has so much drippiness from his sinuses that he chokes and gags and throws up all day. I changed my clothes four times, we did laundry all day and tried our best to keep him cleaned up. With all the spit-up, it is a good thing my nose is blocked up solid too, although the Dayquil/Nyquil combo have been doing a good job getting me through. His antibiotic should start to do its job and maybe tomorrow we will see some improvement.

He did sleep better on the ventilator last night and took some good naps on me today. He wore his mist collar all day long and I just tried to keep him occupied with his favorite things. I held him a lot.

The two healthy boys got out of the house. It was a great Trevor-Daddy day at the zoo, and they both needed it. It made it easy for me to give Brendan my undivided attention too. Bill came home with some great pictures.

Bill worked so hard to do as much as he could tonight so that I could try to get rest. We’ve put Brendan back on the vent for the night and we hope that he gets a good long sleep.