March 26, 2009

The chest tube is out!

Someone from surgery came up around 2pm and took Max's chest tube out. After a few minutes of fussing, he started to look better. He just looks a lot more comfortable overall. He has been awake since 8:00 this morning. He is exhausted, but not interested in sleeping. He has been talking a little bit and smirking. We don't have the full blown smiles yet, but he's definitely getting there. The only downfall of the chest tube coming out is that they will be moving us to a regular floor if the followup xray this afternoon looks good. We LOVE that Max has one on one attention while he is here in the ICU. We don't feel comfortable at all leaving him alone while we are on the floor. There is nothing that we can do about it though, so we just have to live with it.

Max is still on the nasal cannula, but they are hoping to start weaning him off of it shortly. He is only on 2 liters of flow, so it's not much at all. His sats are 99 right now, so I think he will do well with it if they move slowly. His surgeon said that tomorrow would be pushing it for discharge, but he feels that Saturday would be fine as long as we can get him off the oxygen and if he continues to do well with his feeds.

I think that is it. Things are definitely slowing down around here and he is a lot more comfortable this afternoon as compared to this morning.

Please pray that the xray this afternoon shows an inflated lung so that they don't have to put that tube back in his chest.

Talk to you all soon!

1 comment:

tin whisker said...

A chest tube (chest drain or tube thoracostomy) is a flexible plastic tube that is inserted through the side of the chest into the pleural space.