FLU + SMA = NOT a good combination

Hello all!  So Mary and Jackson had been sailing along this fall, both growing like weeds, and going (back) to pre-school.  Kate and I were feeling very fortunate because both of the kids have been very healthy until this week.  Mary and Jackson even had a minor cold or two that we were able to manage well from home for Mary (this is a good thing).  So we were very surprised on Wednesday when Mary started having more secretions, because nobody in the house had been sick and we've really been limiting our exposure to sick people.  We had even decided to pull Mary out of school and begin home-school at beginning of last week, because so many kids in her class had been sick.

So by Wednesday night/Thursday morning, Mary woke us up, crying, needing suction and desaurating. At first, we didn't think it was too big of a deal, given her past 2 colds were pretty light.  We immediately stated increasing her BiPap pressures, and treatments to keep her lungs clear.  On Thursday, we decided to take Mary to the local Army hospital to get a chest x-ray and see what was going on in there.  On the way to get the x-ray, Mary desaturated in the van, we raced to the hospital and were able to get the x-ray, but then headed immediately to the ER.  They were great, aleady knew we were on our way.  We were able to stabilize Mary, but we releaized that we might be dealing with more than just a light cold.  The ER staff decided to transport Mary via helicopter to UMDNJ in Newark.  She was probably stable enough to transport via ground Ambulance, but given it was approaching rush hour out of NYC on a Thursday, it would have turned an 1 hour ambulance ride into several hours.

When we got to the hospital, we found out Mary has Influenza A.  We continued to do aggressive airway clearance, but we just weren't getting that much out of her lungs.  However, we could tell that there was still mucus in her airway, because we could hear it, and her O2 SATS weren't that great, even after treatment.  Mary's mucus (from the flu) is very think and sticky and we've had a very hard time getting it completely out of her lungs and upper respiratory tract.  This sticky mucus caused her to desaturate last night, even while bleeding 100% O2 into her ventillator, we tried to clear her all night long, but finally this morning we had to make the decision to intubate her, to give her body, lungs, and nostrils a break from hours of continuous coughing and suctioning.

The intubation went fine, but she has still be having some trouble with low O2 saturations, so she had been on 60-80% O2 all day. But she is resting comfortably now, and thankfully there is no pneumonia in her lungs.

Please keep up the prayers for Mary!