Well, things were going great: Angie was feeling well, we were weaning her off of the oxygen, etc.\u00a0 Angie wanted to go for a walk, but I convinced her that she ought to try something a little less intense, like sitting in a chair for a bit instead.\u00a0 (Previous attempts at walks have been really hard on her.)\u00a0 She wants to go home and has been anxious to try and push herself to accomplish her daily goals.\u00a0 So, we called the nurse and got her sitting in the chair.\u00a0 Very quickly, her oxygen saturation levels got quite low.\u00a0 Low enough that they called the doctors and ordered a stat chest x-ray and blood work.\u00a0 There were 2 or 3 nurses in here very quickly as we got her back into bed and lying down.\u00a0 They hurriedly put a face mask on her instead of the nasal cannula and turned up the oxygen to the max.<\/p>\n
The doctors came and all looked a little concerned as they talked to us and each other.\u00a0 The biggest concern they have is why this is happening.\u00a0 During the whole thing, Angie remained calm and didn’t feel any pain or discomfort besides some strong fatigue while in the chair.\u00a0 One of the younger doctors came in after their meeting out in the hallway and chatted with us for a minute.\u00a0 His name is Dr. Perizo and he was very nice.\u00a0 He wanted to try a little experiment with the oxygen saturation levels and sitting up.\u00a0 They wanted to see if the low sats came from exertion or from body position.\u00a0 So, they put the bed all the way down and let Angie lie for 5 minutes to see how she would do.\u00a0 She got to 96% saturation, which is actually the best she’s been since she’s been here.\u00a0 Of course, she was on a ton of extra oxygen.\u00a0 She runs between 90-92% without any extra oxygen just normally with room air.\u00a0 Then Dr. Perizo and I helped her to sit up in the bed and watched for 5 minutes.\u00a0 It took a bit, but her oxygen slowly dropped to below 85% and her heart rate went up a little.\u00a0 She didn’t feel any worse, but it was clear something was different.\u00a0 We even tried swinging her legs over the edge of the bed and letting her sit like that, but it wasn’t much different.<\/p>\n
Here’s the thing: I’m not sure this is anything new.\u00a0 The few times she has gotten up over the last few days we unplug her oxygen sensor so she can walk away from the bed, and by the time we plug her back into the sensor, she’s lying on the bed.\u00a0 We had never had her plugged in and vertical since she has arrived.\u00a0 A couple of times getting up, she’s started to look really pale.\u00a0 I think that this has happened a few times, but we’ve just not seen it.\u00a0 I’m really glad we caught it so we can watch for it, but it certainly gave us a little scare.\u00a0 The chest x-ray showed her pneumothorax has healed, which is great (but doesn’t explain the recent episode).\u00a0 I think nothing new happened this evening, I think we just saw something that has been happening unobserved previously.\u00a0 It is still concerning, but not as bad as originally feared, I think.<\/p>\n
Angie’s doing just fine now.\u00a0 Since everyone was so worried, the nurses wanted her on a mask, but she had just ordered dinner.\u00a0 Eating was interesting.\u00a0 She seems to do better lying down, so we reclined the bed, but that made it difficult to eat, so I fed her instead.\u00a0 They let her put the nasal cannula back on and just hold the mask near her face and put it on between bites.\u00a0 They wanted her to stay above 88% while she ate.\u00a0 We were able to forgo the back-and-forth and just let the mask sit on her chest while I fed her.\u00a0 She’s sitting now on the bed with her phone looking at facebook & such with sats between 90-92%, and she’s not wearing her mask (shh, don’t tell the nurse).<\/p>\n
Now for the best part; this ought to give you a smile.\u00a0 You’ve earned it by reading through this post.\u00a0 So, Angie is on a “very low sodium diet” as per doctor’s orders.\u00a0 The menu has a few items marked as low sodium, but she is very<\/em> low sodium, so even some of those are off-limits.\u00a0 Angie has had the turkey before, but of course she can’t have gravy.\u00a0 Instead of just eating it dry, she decided to get creative.\u00a0 She ordered some vegetable broth and mashed potatoes and just mixed them together to make her own gravy!\u00a0 That’ll show those dieticians that are trying to foil our good flavor.\u00a0 That’s why I love Angie.\u00a0 Well, just one of the many reasons why…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Well, things were going great: Angie was feeling well, we were weaning her off of the oxygen, etc.\u00a0 Angie wanted to go for a walk, but I convinced her that she ought to try something a little less intense, like sitting in a chair for a bit instead.\u00a0 (Previous attempts at walks have been really […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[21,8,13],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8WrW-j6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1184"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1184"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1185,"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1184\/revisions\/1185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.angieandjim.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}