There we were sat in Special Care, feeling pretty pleased with ourselves and SJ’s miracle baby efforts to get from deaths door to just a few steps away from the hospital door in a little under 3 months and then with a blink of the eye (no pun intended) we’re right back in our old friend ICU!  It felt like the scene in The Great Escape where after months of planning, digging and crawling through tunnels, Steve Mcqueen can see freedom in Switzerland, just a small motorbike jump away,  only to get tangled in the fence and cruelly dragged back to his cell in the pow camp.

And here we are today, all wired up and ventilated and recovering from her laser eye surgery.

And her nemesis….the ventilator returns…

Whilst the rest of us can nip to spec savers for a bit of laser eye surgery at lunchtime and be home for tea, add our old friend chronic lung disease into the equation and everything gets a bit trickier, hence the return of the necessary but slightly evil vent.

Now SJ didn’t really dig having a tube down her throat when she was a teeny 800g baby with crappy lungs so we’re told she was less than pleased as a whopping 3kg baby this morning when the doc had to intubate her. A few elephantine doses of morphine and other drugs later, SJ conked out and the tube was in.

The eye doc tells us the surgery went well and fingers crossed that’s the end of the ROP although only time and weekly eye checks will tell.

The next problem to solve is getting this tube out again and that task has fallen to Doctor C yet again, who had the honours last timr round too. He’s just been to see us and fill us in on his cunning plan! With the morphine gradually wearing off and SJ slowly coming round, she’ll soon be alert enough to do her own breathing but likewise will be more than a touch upset to discover that someone’s rammed a pipe down her throat whist she was sleeping (not to mention grouchy about not having been fed since 1am last night). So the plan is to get her mad. So mad that when they whip the tube out, she’ll be so pleased, she’ll crack on with the breathing somewhere close to where she left off yesterday ideally.  Sounds simple enough but the tricky bit is going to be not pandering to her tantrums in the meantime and everyone holding their nerve as she wakes up and starts kicking up a storm about thr tube. Whip it out too early when she’s still sleepy and she runs the risk of not coping without it and needing to be re-intubated (no doubt with a wheelbarrow load more drugs in order to do so) and leave it in too long and she’ll start rebelling against it by holding her breath, desating and any other way she can find to show her displeasure.

And so the waiting game has started and all we can is sit here and chat to her whilst she gradually wakes up. Fingers crossed our next post tomorrow will include a picture of a very happy Savannah, back on the vapotherm and looking around to see what she can see with her eye job complete! Watch this space.