A lot has happened since our last post. I started to write one big update on everything and realized it was a bit too long. Instead I am going to break things up into a few posts.
Toward the end of May Casey had some signs of a possible urinary type infection (this was new for her). Her pedi put her on an antibiotic that Casey did not respond to well at all. Casey started having a lot of extra thick and huge increase in her secretions. It got to a point where we were suctioning out in a few hours what we would usually get over the course of an entire day. She was no longer having wet diapers either. We were worried she had aspirated on the increased secretions so we called the pedi back. She changed Casey to a different antibiotic and had us take her to get her lungs checked. Her lungs looked good and the urine test finally came back clean as well.
Casey’s doctor thought that maybe the initial antibiotic started Casey down a bad path, then the new antibiotic was making her already fragile body even more uncomfortable. We stopped the antibiotics all together and watched to see if Casey’s stomach felt a little better and her secretions returned to normal.
I was scheduled to head to Pittsburgh the first week in June and so we watched her really close to see if I would need to cancel my trip or not. My trip was just a Wednesday thru Friday and by the weekend she seemed to be looking much better. I decided I could take the trip.
We have been without a Thursday-Saturday night nurse for a while. Luckily one of our other nurses agreed to cover the Thursday while I was gone so that Tim could still work and get some sleep. I would have to come home and then do the Friday and Saturday night shift, but at least Casey was looking better and there was coverage while I was gone.