Day 1 After ECMO.. April 6, 2011

The ups and downs continue.....While we were happy that Maddox came off ECMO, we knew there would be tough waters to tread.  That was certainly the case.  Maddox came off ECMO April 5th.  We went to bed with a measure of relief that night only to awaken to bad news.  His blood pressure dropped over night and it was alarming to doctors.  The low blood pressure caused a chain reaction of other problems and completely threw his unbalanced system off even more.  Without the right amount of blood going through his lungs it would only be a matter of time before they ran into oxygenation issues.  We mentioned that Maddox came off ECMO on a ventilator called an oscillator which would cause his lungs to stay open all the time as air passed through.  One of the risks is that it can sometimes be hard to push blood through the lungs thus causing pulmonary hypertension. This was the case with Maddox.  We must say that this was a risk that had to be taken because the oscillator was the only way Maddox was coming off ECMO alive.  They worked relentlessly all day to try to get it raised.  Since he was born, his blood pressure had been on the low side but they were able to control it with medication.  Now that medication no longer did the job.  They tried another medication on top of the one he was already on and that was unsuccessful.  They then went to a third and that was also unsuccessful.  Against reservation, Maddox was put on a fourth medication.  By the end of the day he was on four different medications simultaneously for blood pressure with all of them just about maxed out. This was in addition to a couple of antibiotics that he was on due to previous surgeries.  They were able to get his blood pressure under control.  The bad thing is that it took four medications to do it.