Lucas Camilo

This morning we found out that it was in fact an infection that was ailing Lucas on Friday… but not a bad one.  It seems likely that the little fella has a urinary tract infection that also affected his digestive system (preemies are so little that infections rarely remain localized).  The good news is that he’s already seen the worst of it and now just needs to rest up a few days so that he can get back to his feeding routine.

Saturday consisted mostly of Lucas sleeping, but he seemed to sleep especially peacefully when being read to by Gramma Susan, who also got to hold Lucas for a while.  Tomorrow we’re off for the day to our good friend’s wedding (actually they’re getting “domestically partnered” just like us – congratulations Max and Jess!) and so Susan will get to spend a lot more time reading to Lucas.

We’ve posted a lot of pictures of Lucas on this blog over the past 6 weeks but we finally decided to put some of our favorites on a flickr page.  Check ’em out below.

Lucas got off to a rough start today. Burke arrived at the hospital for some early-morning loving only to find that the little guy had just vomited up about half of his recent feed. This is the first time we’ve seen anything like that, and another little vomit followed shortly after. Then came a drop in his temperature and a bad “blood gas” (the test which measures the PH level and CO2 content in his blood, among other things.) The combination had the doctors worried that Lucas might have an infection.

So the team went into action: they ordered an x-ray of his stomach, raised the settings on his vent, cut off his feedings, brought in the heating light, and got ready to place an IV. In the midst of it all, they realized that both his breathing tube and feeding tube were not well placed, so those also got adjusted. Finally, they took some blood and sent it downstairs for testing. But since the definitive cultures which show infection take a few days to come back, they decided to put him on antibiotics immediately as a precaution.

On top of it all they put these hand splints on me!

In order to start the antibiotics they had to get a line into one of his veins. Aside from his struggles breathing, Lucas has been remarkably healthy of late: until this morning he always took his breast milk, he poops and pees with gusto, and he no longer has any blood issues. Therefore, he hasn’t needed any lines into his vein for a while (which certainly helps with the cuteness factor.)   Today for some reason his veins were having a hard time getting threaded so after close to three hours of poking his arms and legs they finally got the line set… into his head! (It sounds and looks rough, but its actually common practice.) As if that weren’t enough, they came in shortly thereafter to give Lucas a spinal tap, once again to collect fluid for more tests. Unfortunately, after 30 minutes of poking his back they weren’t able to get any fluid.

His parents were in pretty bad shape at that point, but something funny was going on that no one seemed to be noticing: Lucas actually looked pretty good. And after the breathing tube adjustment, his blood gases were a lot better. Infection?  Probably not.

And sure enough, a few tests and indicators (such as his white blood cell count) came back showing no signs of infection. Meanwhile, his blood gases continued to improve, bringing the vent settings back down to where they had been before the vomiting episode began. One of the doctors surmised that it may have just been the bad tube placement that led to the whole thing.

Lucas’s busy day wasn’t over yet though: he was still scheduled – from days before – for a special x-ray session to determine if his GI tract was functioning properly. So they loaded him into the transport incubator and pushed him down to the second floor radiology room, with his vent and IV fluid tagging along behind. We’ll spare you the details of this lengthy episode, but it involved Lucas getting strapped to a towel-covered plank, put under a giant x-ray machine, and rotated about as if on a skewer. Once again, he performed admirably and the radiologist concluded that he had well functioning anatomy when it comes to his upper GI tract.

He’s resting comfortably now and looking forward to seeing his grandma tonight – Krista’s mom is just arriving from Portland to spend the weekend with Lucas. We’re taking a deep breath and feeling relieved that Lucas made it through a rough day, in fact a rough week.  Little Lucas Camilo is a certainly mystery sometimes.  He continues to surprise the doctors, amaze us, and inspire many of his blog enthusiasts through his progress in life.

(note: the server that hosts Lucas’s webpage was down this afternoon – sorry for the inconvenience.)

We came in this morning and found Lucas doing great: he was awake and wiggling, the settings on his ventilator had been turned down low again, and his right lung – which had partially collapsed during the extubation – was reopened.   Healthy lungs are especially good news to us because it means we can pick him up out of his crib and hold him.  By late morning Krista was “kangarooing” Lucas (holding him skin-to-skin on her chest) while all three of us rocked out to Bruce Springsteen.

As we listened to the song “Waiting on a Sunny Day” it occurred to us that there is a positive upshot of the unsuccessful extubation: Lucas might be coming home with us very soon.  Going ahead with a tracheostomy to open his airway is now pretty much inevitable, and though we originally were adverse to the idea, it’s clear that a trach is both necessary and the ticket to getting us all home.

We’ll write more about what it means later, but for now we wanted to share a picture, as well as a sad goodbye. The picture is of an incredible, full rainbow that appeared outside our window shortly after Lucas was re-intubated.  At the time we thought that the rainbow was a good omen, and then we found out later that it appeared in the sky around the time that a dear friend of Burke’s family, John Waller, was taking his last breaths in the world after a bout with cancer.  He and his wife Patsi have been avid followers of Lucas’s blog during the final weeks of John’s life, and we’ve been moved by how much Lucas’s story has impacted them (see their comment on “Choosing us”).  Patsi and her family are in our thoughts as we sit with Lucas this afternoon.