One Day At A Time

Day 1.  At this stage, every day is day 1--introducing new triumphs and new trials.  For baby Jordan it is the first day after his infusion of T-cells; the first day his body may be slowing down in order to heal.  He still has a long way to go, but he made it through day one and today that is all that matters.

After a long night in which the doctors and nurses continued to give Jordan fluids and other medications and the respiratory team continued adjusting Jordan's ventilator settings to get him to a place where his lungs could expel CO2 more effectively, we started the day with a Ph balance that was still too low.  It took another 8 hours of working and tweaking before his CO2 levels finally came into a safe range and his Ph levels followed.  Now he just needs to maintain.

With the lungs more stable, the doctors turned their attention to the other major organs that appeared to be impaired after the event yesterday--the liver and kidneys.  As a result of the liver not being able to fully clear toxins in Jordan's body, Jordan's skin is turning yellow.  There is no medication to fix the liver and like all major systems, it just has to have enough time to fix itself,  Apparently the liver is good at this.

As for the kidneys, they are not as great at healing themselves.  For some reason they shut completely down last night and without kidney function, Jordan has been unable to release any of the fluid given to him yesterday or otherwise produced and processed by his body.  This means his skin is getting tight and his body is filling up like a water balloon.  To avoid having other organs, such as his lungs, fill up with fluid, the doctors have him on only a life-sustaining minimum level of fluids and had an ultrasound done to determine if the kidneys are blocked by an enlarged stomach.  If the size of the stomach is restricting the flow of blood to the kidneys, the doctors will need to do stomach surgery to reduce some of this pressure. If not, they need to do dialysis to clear the fluid.

I suppose of the two options, dialysis is the least invasive and allows the kidneys time to heal as the lungs appear to be doing.  Either way he is headed to the operating room to get another line put into his already riddled body.  We have gone from minute by minute to hour by hour and still Jordan fights through.