Roller Coaster ride with Mckenna

They say that good days are often followed by bad days in the NICU, and that things can change at any time without notice, and that's exactly what Mckenna decided to do yesterday. About 5pm yesterday, they were bringing her down for a kangaroo care, where they put the baby on mom or dad's chest for some skin to skin contact. When they brought her to me, for some reason she started to "de-sat" (oxygen saturation), which means her oxygen level in her body is reducing. When this happens, usually they just turn up the ventilator to fix it, and the kids bounce back with their oxygen levels. Our twins are certainly no strangers to the de-sat, because that's basically all they've done since coming to the NICU-- (some nurses have even nicknamed them "ding" and "dong" because monitors always beep when the kids de-sat, and it happens so often with them).. Anyway, yesterday Mckenna was de-sating when they put her on my chest, and the nurse couldn't turn up the ventilator high enough to keep her saturation level around 85-95% which is where it's supposed to be. The vent was turned up from 40 to 50, then 60, 70, 80-- all in a span of about 30 minutes. We had to put her back in the incubator because something was definitely wrong.. she still continued to de-sat, so I called Karisa who was home cooking dinner and gave her the not too unfamiliar news that "Mckenna is struggling." She rushed over, and unfortunately Mckenna still continued to drop while in her incubator. The vent was turned up to 90 and then full blast, 100. It still wasn't as bad as last time, which ironically happened exactly two weeks ago, when she was sick with pneumonia. Yesterday the nurses were able to keep her sat level in the 85-95 o2 range with the ventilator on full blast. (Last time she was around 30-50 sat level on 100% O2 for a few hours. She went limp, and she had no color to her skin at the time. Two high risk doctors, a heart specialist and a respiratory specialist, two nurses and a social worker were all on the scene then, and we didn't know if she would make it). Yesterday was different because she was moving around a little bit, and still had her color, so although we were worried, we knew that she had made it through worse than this. There were only nurses on the scene yesterday instead of half a dozen doctors and specialists like last time. She was only at 100% support for about 20-30 minutes yesterday, as opposed to several hours last time. Anyhow, they brought in a new ventilator and it took her down from 100% support to 60-70%. Today she remains still higher than usual on the ventilator but at least she's "sat-ing" in the 80's and 90's like she should. She may have an infection, but they think it's just her lung disease and the only thing that can really fix it is for her to grow. She is tolerating her feeds OK, and we're so anxious for her to put on weight and for this problem to correct itself because it's causing us mucho stress. Anyway, the good news is that Con-man is doing just fine on the cpap machine, and may not ever need to go back to the ventilator if he keeps it up. We have heard him cry for the first time since coming off the ventilator because the vent tube prevents throat noise. His cry sounds more like a wheezing sound than a cry, because his voice isn't very well developed, but I'm sure that will come with time as well