the up the down the in between.

So no pics right this second, but an update. Pepper was taken off the ventilator one week ago tomorrow--back to the tauntaun facemask, not so flattering and clearly irritating to her. Every 5 minutes the miniature hands would find the tubes and proceed to pull them out of her nose causing a crash in her oxygen levels and a nice loud hissing sound of air from the tubes. She lasted like this through Tuesday but with multiple "brady episodes", the drop in heart rate followed by many alarm sounds. We happened to be there one night when this happened seven or eight times--unnerving to us as she would turn blue from head to toe and nurses and practictioners and respitory therapists would flood her bedside. To make a long long story short--they reintubated her and then 6 hours later extubated because she wasn't improving on the vent and gave her pretty little oxygen prongs that are much more proportional to her little figure. Pepper C. seems to love them and has been doing extremely well expanding her lungs and learning to breathe. She is gaining some weight--just over birthweight, a heavy 1 lb 13 oz--gram by gram.