It’s certainly not good - but maybe for my standards. I painted Christi’s nails during the 7th day of her hospitals stay. That’s about the threshold of comfort for keeping a person on a ventilator. At least that’s what the doctors told me when they were placing the tube. Now, on the 8th day they’ve just weaned her pressures to 8. She’s doing well enough too. Holding 95% oxygen saturation. At pressures of 6 they can pursue extubation. Complicating What she's recovering from, she has what they call “fragile vasculature” - probably from frequent IVs, her veins often fail to sustain one for very long. When peripheral veins won’t do, their solution is a central line. Her complicated situation and history makes only one possible location viable. That would compromise that lone avenue enough that they would rather do a port than a line. Something with durable access - at least for a while. Sometimes it’s hard not to feel that medical treatment, as life preserving as it has been for her, might be what takes her in the end. Such unproductive thoughts need to be held at bay though.
She’s being sedated too - ketamine and precidex are being dripped simultaneously into the current peripheral IVs in both her big toes. It seems a precarious toe-hold on venal access really, but with each toe also recovering gradual flushing fluids, maybe this counts as “dipping your toes in the water” -- like the Levites carrying the arc of the covenant needed to do before the Lord would part the Jordan River providing a pathway into the promised land. The irony that these chapters are our current study in the Old Testament isn’t lost on us. Heavenly Father is such a skilled teacher!
Also relevant is the song I used to sing to Christi in the tune of the theme to Elmo’s world. “Daddy takes me camping, and puts my feet in the stream. That’s daddy’s world” Hospital camping isn’t what we had in mind for the start of our summer this year, but we’ll take it. We trust Him enough to wade in. He'll open the way, He always has. Stand in the river with us and watch. :)
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