Update 3 - Lung issues

When I last posted here, Michael had just gone back into oxygen at night, and I was really struggling to comprehend how at 6 he'd ended up back in 02. I may be wrong but most prem babies have long since lost their 02 concentrators by now; and I had really hoped that we would be waving that machine good-bye once and for all this year, but the overnight SAT's reading kinda put pay to that - at least for the time being.

So here we are some 8 months later and Michael is still in 02; and due back to see the ENT next week.

Following his surgery an over-night trace was repeated, which was excellent, Michael did really really well....the suggestion was to try him without 02 for two weeks to see how he went; can't say I was very happy at that suggestion, because I wasn't convinced that it was a proper reading done when Michael was imobile and just after surgery but what do I know? I may have been way off the mark in thinking that this perhaps wasn't/wouldn't be a "true" reading.

By the end of the second week off of 02 we had a child on our hands who couldn't walk far without tiring and was wanting to be picked up, whose energy levels had fallen, to the point where he was spending most of his time laying about. Fortunately it was school holidays so we could let him sleep in, in the mornings, and it didn't really matter that he was tired, and less than co-operative. So back into 02 he went...........

Since then I've taken Michael out of 02 for a week and monitored his SAT's levels, the night after he came off of 02 he did perfect 96%, and I was doing the happy dance, by the end of the week, he was spending longer and longer periods below 90 - with an increase in heart rate attached too.

We have been referred to one of the London Hospital's for a Polysomnography The hope is that this will show just what is going on whilst Michael is asleep, so we are currently waiting for our date to come around for this.

We were also referred for full lung function testing, this involved Michael sitting in a box, about the size of a telephone box, and breathing into a tube, amongst other things. We don't have the full results of this testing yet, and won't until our next visit with the Resp in February.

So I guess you could say our Lung issues are still ongoing!