Almost there...

The past few days have really been nerve racking. It seems like every night Caydence decides to get really mad and not want to settle. I don't know what it is about night time that she doesn't like. She doesn't really do that during the day while we are there. I think that she just knows that we aren't there all night and wants us to be there or something. She spiked a fever yesterday and the day before. We collected blood cultures, a urine culture,and a sputum culture. The first blood culture showed something but they suspected that it was just contaminated so we re-drew another set and are waiting to see what that shows. Her respiratory culture showed something growing also. They aren't thinking that it is really anything serious. With her being intubated for so long she is prone to having something colonizing in there. She isn't showing any other signs of  having an infection so they really aren't too worried about it. The only thing that sucks is that since the culture did show something she has to be on contact and droplet isolation. So now just going into her room we have to gown up and everything. Her X-Rays and everything else look really good with no signs of pneumonia and no signs of collapse. We went down on her rate on the ventilator today to 10 which is basically extubatable. So our plan is for tomorrow to go down to a rate of 0 for 30min to 1hour and see how she does. If she does fine with that then we know that she should do just fine when we pull the tube out. If she does good with the sprint tomorrow then the plan is for Monday or Tuesday to pull the tube and see what happens. I think that she is going to be able to do it but there is always that "what if" thought in the back of my head. We have been pretty good about only thinking positive about all this but sometimes it's really hard. I think that she is really trying to prove to us now tho that she can do it and that she is ready. She still has been breathing pretty fast but I think that everyone is in agreement that that is just the way she is going to breath. Most babies breath in the 30-40s but Caydence breaths in the 60-70s. We think that her omphalocele plays a part in that.  You use your abdominal muscles to help you breath, and hers aren't really normal because she has that. The only thing they really worry about with her breathing so fast is that she is going to burn too many calories and not gain weight, but she has slowly been putting more weight on so everyone is fine with her breathing faster than normal. She really is a baby that has stumped a lot of doctors and really made them think. She likes to keep everyone on there toes. She truly is unique and very complicated. We can be thankful that we have some of the best doctors around caring for her. Sometimes we get so angry with them and with the whole hospital in general, but deep down we really know that she couldn't be in a better place. So lets just hope that tomorrow she does fine with the sprint on 0 rate and we can plan on taking that tube out and moving on from there. I will be sure to update tomorrow and let everyone know how it goes. Again I want to thank everyone for all the thoughts, prayers, and generosity you all have shown. And an extra thank you to our neighbors Lena and Darren for taking care of our house and our animals while we have been gone for so long! I don't know what we would do without you guys!