Saturday, January 19, 2013

Irregular Heart Rhythms...still in the ICU

We were hoping by today that we would out of the ICU, but Joshua decided to make other plans.

Over the past 3 days, Joshua has been having these spells of irregular heart rhythm. From what they can tell, it is different then the ones he had a while ago and seem to be related to him having two SA nodes in the atria of the heart (look it up...pretty fascinating). His heart rate gets fast, he gets sweaty, limp and his EKG is very weird. They are trying to figure out what is causing all of this so they can treat it. Hopefully it will be something simple.

Another thing that showed up this morning was his glucose levels were pretty low. After testing it a few times and it still being low, they sent a bunch of labs in to see why that is happening. Hopefully that won't add any more complications to this recovery.

Joshua is such a sweet baby. When you look into his eyes, he has such wisdom and love in them. I feel so blessed to be his mom. Hopefully we will be out of the icu soon and on our way back home!

One day, one of our nurses put him in this cute sleeper for the day.  It was so good to see him in real clothes and look relatively normal! 


This is him getting is Echo done.  It is basically an ultrasound of the heart where they check function and flow. Everything came out normal.  This was our first experience with have Joshua sedated for his echo, at least with us in the room.  I was not really happy with the sedation medication they gave him (it was called Ketamine...for those of you who know), since it didn't knock him out very well and he had a really hard time coming out of it.  He was really mad and it took a little longer than I would have liked.  I hope next time they can use something else. 


In the mean time, we are having a lot of snuggle time! 

1 comment:

  1. I am glad to see an update! I am sorry to hear that he has two SA nodes... Grant does too and it can be tricky to work with! One of our other heterotaxy buddies ended up have two ablation procedures to try and burn off one of the nodes in order to keep his heart in a normal rhythm since it continued to cause problems for a few years. Grant's luckily only seem to compete on certain medications and in anesthesia recovery. I am sorry that he didn't recover well on the Ketamine (we call it Special K :) ) . Keep a list for your own reference so that they can try something else. Are you sure he wasn't also on versed? Usually they sedate for echos using both of those and so you will want to narrow down which one he is having a tough time with. I hope that they can start to find some solutions to help Joshua's rhythms stabilize and send him to the floor soon so he can hang out with his big brother! We continue to pray every day for you all.

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Joshua Kent Ipson was born December 1, 2012 with a very complicated combination of congenital heart defects. After 2 1/2 months of fighting for his life, he passed away on February 13, 2013. We invite you to share our experiences as we grieve his loss, rejoice in God's plan, & keep Joshua's message of hope alive.
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