Bipap in the Evening

We started our bipap trial on the evening of 3/27/20. Since then, Joey was weaned to about 400 ccs today at about 9 AM.  I believe that the bipap has helped him to wean and has also allowed him to have more reserve during the day, since essentially he gets to reset every evening for the next day.  He has been on 500 ccs for the last two days, and has saturated in the high 90s to a 100.  Right now, he's in the low to mid 90s-not as high.  He has also been making this intermittent snorting sound. I'm not sure the reason.  He has not always done this. I'm not sure if he needs to be continuously suctioned or not, or if has helped. I'm concerned there may be an obstruction of some sort, but it seems like that obstruction would have occurred prior to just recently.

With the bipap, Joey has had some struggles with the mask fitting, but after several tweaks, we may have figured it out.  Krista, the respiratory therapist supervisor, sewed the straps on a particular way to help with keeping the head gear on him. I think it helped him last night.  The interesting part about it all is when I first talked to Krista, I knew she looked familiar. It turns out that she was the one friend that I had in my statistics class at TSU in the summer of 2004! When I started my doctoral program, I had to take an undergraduate statistics class. You know when you take a class where you know no one, you learn to make friends with a person or two to help you get through the class. She was my one friend.  She was the first person that taught me what a respiratory therapist does, because I had no idea what that entailed in my early to mid twenties!  Her introduction to respiratory therapy always stuck out to me in my mind that when I arrived to the NICU with Joey, I always remembered her telling me about what respiratory therapists do, and how TSU was one of the only programs around that offered this degree.  The irony is that she would be the one over all the respiratory therapists in the NICU of where we are at now, and she would be the one finding an out of solution box for Joey. I believe she is the one that sewed his straps, and is problem solving this dilemma. I remember one of the main reasons why I chose her to be my statistics buddy that summer-she was a very kind person. I'm glad that God put her back in my life and she has been a huge part of helping Joey find a solution to his respiratory solutions. How about that for a nice God wink. I like how God continues to show us that He is there for us.

 Where are my arms? Joey had to trial the sleep sack so he wouldn’t take the mask off his face.