Goodbye Ventilator

Jeremiah and I celebrated our wedding anniversary on May 12th.  By celebrate I mean that I spent the entire day loving on Sophia.  See, way back in April I had to choose a mid May date to admit her to the hospital to wean her off the vent.  I chose May 13th.  I didn't want to do it on our anniversary so I chose the next day.  Unfortunately, our anniversary was less than stellar this year.  Oh well.  There'll be more.

So here we are.  The moment we have been waiting for was upon us.  It was time to see if Sophia can breathe on her own without a vent.  Upon admission, she was off the vent for two hours during the day and three hours at night.  The plan was to have her off the vent for twelve hours during the day and put her back on the vent at night.  By May 16th she was off six hours during the day and six hours off at night.  I thought the doctors were moving WAY too fast.  My biggest fear was that Sophia would crash and burn AND she would have a massive setback.  But she just laughed and clapped her way through the entire process.  

  By May 23rd, she was breathing on her own without ANY respiratory support.  WHAT?!?! She did it!  No code blues.  No setbacks.  No nothing.  Just like that.  Done!  All the months of keeping her isolated and protecting those lungs had paid off!  May 29th was discharge day and we were out of there!  Below are a couple of pics of her journey.

On day two she's just hangin' out watching it all happen.  I love that she loves her race car.

THIS was such a fun day!  I was giving her a bath and for some crazy reason I burst in Tina Turner's Proud Mary.  The moves and everything.  The more she loved it the more I got into character.  It was wild and man we had fun!

I love the way she gets so excited whenever we come visit her.  On this day, we snuck up on her and I finally remembered to record her reaction to our entrance.

We brought the girls up for a visit one day.  They were happy to see Sophia and Sophia was happy to see them.   

 Don't know why I have this one but here you go.  That's the problem with blogging an event from six weeks ago.  You can't remember a single thing and why you took a photo.  Geez!

This here is Debbie and I will forever be grateful for this lady.  She was Sophia's nurse practitioner and I loved her.  She has seen Sophia at her best, worst, and everywhere in between.  And, she held my hand through it all.  We were discharging and walking out the door and she told me that she was resigning.  I felt like she knocked the wind out of me!  After I was happy for her and was smiling again, we took pictures.

On May 29th, 17 days after admission, Sophia Lynette was breathing on her own without a vent.  Yay!  Also, Sophia no longer has pulmonary hypertension.  Double yay!  While we were there, her doctor and I agreed to try to wean her off of a couple of medications.  She was weaned off lasix and sildenafil.  We were hoping to get her off of her clonidine but Sophia wasn't having that.    

After many prayers and support from friends and family, this little girl has made a tremendous amount of improvement.  She's been doing great and hasn't had any serious setbacks.  God bless her for that!