As most people know, when you have a loved one in ICU there's not much to do but look at said loved one and stare at the monitor. Maybe since we're free Americans and so trained to watch TV, we'll watch any TV... even if it's one where the only TV show looks like a stock ticker and has just as many thrills as watching your 401k graph on a minute-by-minute basis. In Cannon's case, some of those numbers are of particular interest and we find ourselves staring at them for hours on end.
The pic above is the only TV show we've been watching for the last couple days. The green 139 is the heart rate. This morning it's down to just over 100 and the pacemaker has been removed! The red 69/47 is currently around 90/60 which is about where we want it. The two white numbers below that are the pressures in the left and right atria, we want those around 8 and we're not there yet. The yellow 40 is carbon dioxide, and 40's in the middle of the acceptable range.
The blue 96 is his "pulse ox". It's the number Tori and I are VERY familiar with, it's the number we've been watching for 6 years to tell us when surgery would be necessary. It turns out this number never got down into the mid 80s like we thought it would, so we were able to hold off having his surgery until absolutely necessary. This number represents the amount of oxygen in Cannon's blood. Most of us run at 100%, a bad case would put it at 95%, but Cannon was always below that at 90% on average. It fluctuated a lot on him because his blood was oxygenated "by accident". Until yesterday, his body only got oxygenated blood because a hole in the middle of the heart allowed oxygenated blood from the lungs to "mingle" with unoxygenated blood from the body (in a healthy heart, unoxygenated blood is sent to the lungs, oxygenated, then sent back to the body... there's no mingling of the two). Now that repairs have been made, we're seeing this number hit and hold 100 for the first time in his life.
In addition to the numbers on the right side of the screen, we also look at the white number on the bottom left, temperature. This morning he's great, right at 97 (F)... I'd like to thank whoever wrote the conversion app on my iPhone, so this American can translate the celcius on the monitor to a Fahrenheit number he can relate to.
There's other machines we get to watch, too. There's one dedicated to monitoring the amount of oxygen in his brain. He's been well above minimums on that one. Then there's the breathing machine. This one is really fun to watch. It has an active graph that relates pressure and volume of his breathing. The machine's job is to provide Cannon with a minimum amount of air, while letting him breathe on his own when he wants to. This graph shows us when the machine breaths for him, and when Cannon breathes for himself. And it's real-time, so you can tell with every breath he takes whether the machine did it for him or if it was him trying to do it on his own. I watch this machine more than anything. It's a true sign of how far he's come in 24 hours. We've watched the machine do all of the breathing (tall narrow breaths, meaning high volume and little pressure), to watching Cannon do more and more on his own (short fat breaths, meaning little volume and high pressure). As Cannon's breaths start to look more tall and narrow, we'll be getting closer to getting off that machine. You should come watch, it's a real hoot.
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