The whole enchilada

Oakley ended up being extubated today! But then he was re-intubated because he couldn't handle it.

although the bag may not inflate, air is still flowing through the mask!

He was slowly weaned off the ventilation today, and they thought he was ready to be extubated...I really wanted it to happen, so I was getting so excited and antsy. He handled the extubation pretty well, but had a lot of mucus and junk in his throat. He did ok when he was calm, but kept coughing to try to clear his throat. His throat was swollen from the tube being down there and irritating it, so they gave him an inhalable anti-inflammatory nebulizer medicine. That seemed to help, but not a lot. He got two doses of that, and they wanted to give him steroids, but had to clear it with the BMT team. They had to move us to a different room, so that a cardiac patient could have the spot (we were adjacent to the CCU in our room, and they filled up). Once we were moved, they started to deep suction Oakley (so they took a tiny tube about the size of a coffee stirrer straw and attached it to a vacuum sucker and stuck it down his throat) to try to clear his airway more. He started to cough, and his O2 saturation dropped from 100 to 58. He was then crying and coughing and trying to breathe, but his airway was too constricted and irritated to get enough oxygen into his system at that point. The ICU doctors decided to re-intubate him because he had dropped so low. They got the go ahead from the BMT team to give him steroids, and the doc that was on (a Frenchie named Francois) said that the new game plan is to give him 48 hours on the ventilation and steroids before trying the extubation again.

After today's extubation, they put him on a mixture of oxygen and helium through a mask (that was too big for his face) to try to assist him in getting his lungs filled with air. Mixing the oxygen with helium makes the oxygen really thin, so that it can pass through the airways more easily.

I'm taking today's setback harder than I expected. My mom and dad are coming up tomorrow and leaving on Sunday, and I was excited for them to get to spend some quality time with Oakley before he goes through chemo and we have to monitor his exposure to people closely. I was also excited to spend some time snuggling my little guy, since I haven't been allowed to since the wee hours of Tuesday morning. I didn't get to see him smile (he was still sedated a bit, and very uncomfortable from having a tube down his throat), and he is NPO (no products orally) and we don't get to give him breastmilk, even through an NG tube.
I miss being important to my baby. While he's in the ICU, they don't really want us staying the night there, and he's kept so sedated that he doesn't realize when we're there or when we're absent from his bedside. I feel selfish for being upset at my loss of pleasure in my baby, instead of being concerned for his breathing ability; but I know he's in good hands and that I can't do anything about his respiratory care.