Breathing Issues

John's chest tube was pulled on Sunday. Since then he has had increasing difficulty breathing, culminating this morning with him being moved back to the PICU and having a chest tube placed. Already he has put out over 500 ml of fluid from his pleural cavity and is being weaned down on oxygen quickly and should be back on room air by early afternoon.

The Transplant team is divided, part of them want to wait and watch to see if he will stop putting out fluid before discussing other ways to deal with this. Part of them want to just discuss it now and maybe even get on with it. What it is, is calling in the pneumo/throacic surgeons and trying to either scar up the pleural cavity tissue or put sterilized talc in there or use a different antibiotic to see if they can make John stop accumulating fluid in his pleural cavity. These procedures have a 50/50 success rate and no one really wants to try them, but in the end we will see if it is necessary or not.

Mark is busy moving our stuff out of the hospital room back into here and our SSP room (like a small hotel room attached to the hospital that we've had all along.) We will be waiting for some lab results and then hopefully finding some lunch and coffee as breakfast and coffee was preempted by a little guy who needed mommy and daddy very close because not being able to breathe is scary.

We continue to depend on John's safety net of baptism, we continue to pray Lord have Mercy and because we've been in this long scary battle for John's life it's very easy for us to just be scared and worried first and come down from that a bit at a time. Thank you for continuing to pray for John and for us, hopefully soon he will be back up in his chair enjoying nerf guns and gaining his strength back.