breathing issues

They still haven't been able to take the breathing tube out since last week's surgery.  This is a bit of a problem.  The breathing tube is meant to be a short-term solution.  It is not good for the lungs to have the tube in for a long period of time, not to mention the danger of taking it in and out.  So, it has become a very large priority to get the tube out.  Unfortunately, she cannot keep her oxygen levels high enough without it.  A couple of days ago, the doctors decided that the best course of action was to do a tracheostomy, cutting a hole in her throat, and inserting a breathing tube directly into her windpipe.   There are a couple of advantages to this.  It is much safer with less risk of infection in the lungs.  It is easier to allow her to breath on her own when she can.  With the breathing tube, the only way to get her breathing by herself was to take the tube out, but with the trache, they can hook it up to oxygen when she needs it, but plug it and allow her to breath on her own when she can.  This should theoretically make it easier for them to strengthen her lungs and eventually wean her off of it.  The other advantage is that she should be able to talk, or if not talk, at least we should be able to read her lips better than we can with the breathing tube in.  

We were all set to go, thinking that the tracheostomy would probably happen on Monday.  However, when the ear, nose and throat doctor came in to make sure everything was good, he found that her thyroid is swollen.  Because the thyroid is so close to where the incision would be made, they needed to find out what was wrong with her thyroid so that they could take care of it before doing the trache.  Today they did a CT scan to evaluate the thyroid.  When we left the hospital tonight, they were still looking at it and trying to decide the best course of action, but should know tomorrow.  The plan right now is that she will go into surgery tomorrow.  They are planning on either removing the thyroid, removing part of the thyroid, or if they determine there isn't a problem with the thyroid, just moving it out of the way a little.  Either way, they are hoping to do the tracheostomy tomorrow.  We will see.

Other than that, things are pretty much the same.  We are just waiting to figure out the breathing issue so that we can move on with the healing process.

Thank you for all of your thoughts and prayers.