A Pothole

Yesterday, Brenya gave us all a real scare.  Around 6:00 PM the doctor called and told us she had begun to bleed in her lungs.  He said they were trying to stop it, but weren't sure if they could.  We did the only thing we could do and drove to the hospital to be with her.  When we got there they told us they had been trying some different things without too much success.  She had been bleeding since 3:00 PM.  The hope was, that with some different medication and waiting, she would eventually stop.  The also told us that since she was bleeding in her lungs, they worried about bleeding elsewhere in her body, especially her brain.  If she was bleeding in her brain, she would have to come off ECMO, but she could not survive without it.  They planned to do an ultrasound on her in the morning to see if her brain was bleeding or not.  It was a very nerve racking night.  All we could do was hope the bleeding in her lungs would stop and that there was no blood in her brain.  This morning, we called to get an update, hoping for the best but fearing the worst.  The nurse informed us the bleeding had stopped and the ultrasound showed no bleeding in her brain!  This was the best news we could have gotten and we were overjoyed.  But the nurse gave us more good news, Brenya was making more urine! We were very excited about this.
So right now she is working on getting the old blood out of her lungs and getting rid of all her extra fluid.  Her lungs are again oxygenating her blood a little bit.   X-rays show there is still a lot of blood in there though and it will take time for her lungs to reabsorb it all but things have started to work again.  She has already lost a lot of fluid.  She looks so much better than she did yesterday.  She is still poofy, but her nose and lips are little again.  The doctors say 1/4 of her body weight is still extra fluid she needs to loose.  Today was a much better day for her than yesterday with good improvement.  She just needs to keep working on the swelling and repairing her lungs so she can come off ECMO.