The Road to Recovery might be a long one...

We spent the day at the hospital in the PICU (Pediatric Intensive Care Unit) where Ethan is recovering from his surgery. He is still intubated because he is sedated and getting fairly large amounts of morphine to attempt to manage the pain that he is experiencing.

Thankfully, Auntie Tracy was checking in on him all day to make sure his nurse was taking good care of Ethan! (which she was)

Apparently he was a bit of a wild man in the morning, he got mad while the nurse was trying to assess him and he got his hands on some of the tubes and wires so he had little restraints on his wrists when we got there. Not happy about the restraints, but it is for the best for the time-being.

The nurse also said he was the most settled he had been all day once we got there and were holding his hands, rubbing his head and talking to him....he knew we were there, even though he was still pretty out of it. He had a few moments of being in pain where he wriggled around and made his alarms go off, even to the point of getting an extra shot of morphine here and there....but for the most part he was pretty settled.

We were there until close to 10:00pm and then headed home when Ethan seemed comfortable and happy.

Fast forward to 11:30pm.....I got a phone call from the PICU because there was an incident! My heart leapt into my throat. The resident then said, don't worry Ethan is okay. They wanted to inform us that while trying to measure Ethan's tummy they lifted him up and he must have experienced a large amount of pain - so much that he held his breath long enough to turn blue! The nurses took off the ventilator and used the manual puffer thing and it only took a couple of puffs for him to start breathing again. They have now increased the machine from 2 breaths/minute to 20, so incase it happens again the machine will breath for Ethan....if it happens again they are going to increase the machine to 40 so it's always breathing for him. They have left the tape measure under Ethan so they don't need to disturb him when they measure his tummy, so that might be enough to avoid another incident. If his pain is still really unbearable through the night they are going to have an anesthesiologist put in an epidural tomorrow.

Very scary event, but also very thankful that we got the phone call to keep us informed. I will be crossing my fingers and toes all through the night.