Day 684 - Without a vent...

Today started out rough, but turned to pure joy! We had our Lung Center appointment, and even I, didn't expect to have these awesome results. God is so great! From where we were a year ago... All I can say is WOW! Ava's nurse and I fully updated the Doc and RT and they knew they were going down in vent settings. They also decided to do what I hadn't expected - to see how she would do without the vent. They took her off the vent and her O2 saturations actually went up and her CO2 levels went down. Her heart rate stayed the same and she was very comfortable breathing. She wasn't breathing with her belly and she even breathed better standing. We continued until 15 minutes. She didn't get tired, and she looked at us very curiously as to why she couldn't pull the vent off or why we didn't hurry to put it back on. The doc wanted to get another xray since we hadn't had one since April and after they reviewed that, we are going to go down in her Peep by 2 after they review her Xray on Thursday.

We went up to get the Xray and I actually got to see it after. Her left lung looked the clearest I have ever seen it. It really looked amazing. The Xray tech said we could wait to talk to the doctor to get the results, despite what Lung Center said about Thursday. We waited over an hour but we didn't hear anything so we left. We should hear on Thursday. I did run into the tech and she did say she wasn't a doctor but she saw what I saw. We can't wait to hear the results!

Thursday is ENT, and he is a wonderful doc will be very excited to hear the news. We have to keep a watch on Ava's weight, but they do believe that she is being over ventilated since she went up in sats when she was off the ventilator.

We didn't tell Anthony until he saw that Ava was off the vent. The video above is the surprise he got. All I told him is that we were probably going down in vent settings later this week and her Xray looked good. This is definitely the day that the Lord has made. Let us be glad and give thanks in it!

Thanking God for Ava's ability to breathe and praying for her to be fully off the vent in 2012 and to be able to eat...