As you can tell by my news becoming further and further apart, things with Massimo have, on the whole, settled. However, last weekend, Max had a bit of a bad time. On Saturday morning when Max’s oxygen levels dropped badly the nurse cleaned/suctioned his trachy tube and found that there was a lot of fresh blood. Max was immediately taken back into the Intesive Care Unit and they contacted the ENT department to try to discover where the blood came from and what had caused it. Apparently granulated tissue forms along the bottom of a trachy tube once it has been on site for a while. When suctioning his tube this tissue must have been touched/knocked causing the bleeding, which of course went straight into his lungs and caused his drop in oxygen levels. Max was extremely unwell for a period of time and he was put back on the ventilator and suctioned regularly to remove the blood which he was coughing up. Whilst all this was happening his trachy tube then got knocked out of place and the nurses kept him going with the ventilator tube going straight into his lungs whilst they waited for the ENT surgeon to come down and put a new tube in.
All in all, from 8 am to 4 pm Max had a really, really BAD day! When we saw him at about 4 pm he was still on the ventilator, he required an awful lot of oxygen and he seemed very, very tired. As the days have passed he has recuperated slowly. He was taken off the ventilator and put back on CPAP on Tuesday. His oxygen requirement went down to 21% (which is normal air) on Tuesday night but when we saw him on Wednesday he was back on some oxygen (between 30 and 40%). Today he was back in air. Whereas in the first few days he was very sleepy, he has become more and more alert. Hopefully, if he continues to do so well, he will be back in the High Dependency Room by the weekend or soon after.
Other news: Max had his MRI scan today. We should get the results back on Monday although we may get them tomorrow. His videoflouroscopy is set for April 3rd, but this will now be done in-house at St George’s rather than at Great Ormond Street as, among other things, they had a six week waiting list!
An amendment to my last email: Max was on 53 mls of my expressed milk every 3 hours, not every hour! Anyway, he now weighs 2.731 kg (6 lbs) and is on 61 mls every 3 hours. He is as beautiful as ever!