Been hanging tight here today, Ruby is stable and doing alright considering.
She had some chest tube issues last night, so Dr. Horne had to redo some sutures and they seem to be draining better now- they kept leaking before. She has been quite sleepy today as a result of all the drugs they had to give her to keep her comfortable for that. Ketamine and fentanyl don't faze our girl very much!
She's still putting out a lot of fluid from her chest tubes, so they have started her on a low dose of steroids to hopefully help with that. It's still unclear if she has a thoracic duct injury from the surgery or if her body is just pushing fluid/plasma out of her blood stream due to all of the inflammation.
She has a lot of body edema as well, just lots of extra fluid everywhere honestly from all the inflammation. They keep trying to bring her fluid levels down with lasix, and decrease the amount of fluids going in her IVs... but they are worried about her kidneys with the lasix and putting her on antibiotics meant they had the same amount of fluid going in, even with concentrating her meds and nutrition etc. It's a challenge for sure and she's staying pretty puffy, lungs are still wet and it seems to dry out her vascular system more than anything.
They were able to bring her O2 down to 60% on the ventilator, and she's still sitting in the high 80s to low 90s on the monitor. They won't make many other changes for now unless she suddenly improves a whole lot. Basically want to keep her stable until they can get her into the cath lab.
They have booked OR time for the cath lab on Friday, so she will hopefully have it over and done with by Friday evening if all goes well and everyone can be there. There are quite a few risks associated with this type of testing, but she can't stay the way she is and the testing will hopefully give them a better understanding of what's going on, and how to treat it... if they can.
Please be praying for her and this test as we are pretty anxious about it, and as much as we want answers we are worried that we won't like them when we get them. We're feeling tired and discouraged, we hope for the best but everything seems to go wrong in the end. It's hard watching her suffer like this and be unable to do anything except be with her and pray that things turn around.
TLDR: Ruby is stable but at a standstill in her recovery. Big test on Friday, praying for good answers.
