TWISTS AND TURNS

Things can change on a dime.  We learned that lesson this afternoon.  The labs had started to get a little better and then around 3 Charlotte's blood pressure went way down and the her lab work suddenly looked bad.

We had gone out to the waiting room to try and eat some lunch (you cant eat inside the Unit) and we were probably gone a total of 15 minutes.  Sarah had to make a quick stop over in the other building so I went back in by myself.  As soon as I rounded the corner I could tell something was wrong.  Dr. Mendeloff, Dr. Fanning, Dr. Virma, multiple RNs and others were in our room.  The first thing I did was to look up at her main monitor to make sure there was nothing obviously wrong.  There wasn't anything obvious to me but there were certainly things that were obvious to our group of doctors.  Charlotte's blood pressure was down and her lactic acid levels were up.

The team seemed to think that the best thing to do at this point was to put her back on the heart/lung bypass machine to give her heart a long period of rest to hopefully heal itself to a point where it would be able to function properly.  The big issue with going on bypass is that they will have to give her a blood thinner so that the blood doesn't clot while outside the body and during a test this afternoon they found two spots where she has bleeding in the brain.  The bleeding is not terribly uncommon and would not be a problem if they did not have to give her blood thinners.  They are trying to figure out exactly what we are going to do next.  There are so many eyes on her monitors right now and everyone waits to see what the lab work says each hour.  Charlotte is fighting her little tail off right now and hopefully she won't have to go on the bypass machine.  Dr. Mendeloff said that if she goes back on the bypass machine at this point that her odds of surviving are about 50-50.