38 Days on ECMO

We haven't seen the doctor yet this morning, but he has come by the bedside we were told. He wants to make no changes as of yet concerning dialysis.

Dialysis is continuing to make Memphis' blood pressure drop. His blood pressure mean has been in the 20's and mid 30's last night and this morning. The nurse asked the doctor what he wanted to do to fix this and he said nothin for right now. There are several tricks such as giving Memphis steroids or dopamine to help the blood pressure go back up, but the doctor wants to save those tricks to help get him off of ECMO.

Memphis' x-ray is still showing air in the right lung. Yay!

The flow on the ECMO machine has been turned up to .270 to help bring the blood pressure up some. His gas number has been weaned to .27 and his %o2 is 50.4. These numbers along with all his good stats are all showing that Memphis is heading in the right direction. He lost 60 grams last night which puts him at 9 lbs 11 oz! He has come a long way from 14 pounds.

Still, even with all these good numbers there is alot the doctors are worried avout. Such as:

1. the ECMO pump being two weeks old. The machine has several blood clots in the tubes. If one of these clots gets loose and into the oxygenator it WILL shut the machine down. So why not just change the machine you might ask.

2. They are going to change his machine/curcuit but this runs the risk of loosing all of the great progress that he has made. It will definitely push him backwards 24 hours or so. He could loose the oxygen and all his numbers could go back up.

3. The canula in his artery is not stable any longer and is backing out. This is very serious and everyone is watching it very closely. Even if they change the machine and everything goes great, if the calula comes out the machine is useless.

4. He needs a central access once off ECMO so the nurses can give him the fluids he needs. He has a picc line but it has moved and is no longer in the greatest position. They can give him a new picc line somewhere else, but it's tricky to stick a patient that is on heparin.

So, what all this boils down to is we HAVE to come off the ECMO machine soon.