(How’s that for an opening line?)
We had way too much excitement night before last, but all is well again. Around 12:30 a.m. early Tuesday morning, apparently something obstructed Lydia’s airway and suctioning did not clear it. Her oxygen saturation kept dropping and she became unconscious and stopped breathing. Breathing for her with an Ambu bag wasn’t expanding her chest, and we ended up doing an emergency trach change on the floor of her bedroom. After a minute or so of “bagging” her through the new trach tube, she started breathing on her own again and her oxygen saturation was back to normal. That’s when the EMTs came in. Winona rode up to the ER with Lydia, and I followed in the car. (Webster Groves’s finest stopped me for going 41 in a 30, but they let me go.)
Lydia stayed the morning and afternoon back on the 7 East ward at SLCH. She hadn’t been in her room for 30 seconds—she was still being connected to the wall oxygen—when she signed to one of the nurses who knew her, “Signing Time.” “Only Lydia,” the nurse laughed, and explained that she would need to wait to watch her favorite DVD. Two Little Hands Productions would love a video clip of that scene for promotional purposes.
Anyway, she stayed the morning and afternoon with no more excitement, and is back at home.
The worst of it was that two separate people in the hospital said something about how we had done well considering “this was your first time.”
We really don’t ever want a second time.
