A set back

I didn't blog last night because I wanted to make sure we could start out by saying everything is alright. And everything IS alright...So I went in for the 5:00 care last night and I was holding Tucker and trying to give him a bottle (he's been puking lately, so they switched him to soy and that's going better...just a side note) all of the sudden his heart rate shot up to 260 (he's been around 160) and his O2 dropped into the 70's (he's been in the 90's). They put him back in bed and double checked everything to make sure that the monitor was accurate. This next part is from my point of view, and not necessarily medically accurate...All of the sudden there were 5 nurses crowded around his crib (he had gotten moved into a big-boy bed earlier in the day) he oxygen was been cranked up, they ordered a STAT chest Xray and his nurse, Wanda, told on of the other nurses to page his doctor. Meanwhile, other than the monitors going crazy, you'd never know by looking at Tucker that anything is wrong, he's just watching all other hustle and bustle. I started crying (I was working on 2 days in a row without tears, but no go at that point) and one of the nurses made me sit down and explained that his heart wasn't in any danger, they just needed to get his rate down and figure out why it had jumped up. I got kicked out during the Xray (we're used to that) and went to call Jeremy to come down to the hospital (he was trying to study for his mid-term that was re-scheduled for Friday). While he was on the way, one of the nurses brought my a cup of water and told me I had to sit down and drink and she would keep us updates, but at this point there was no news. Shortly after Jeremy got there the doctor came out to say that none of their "usual" methods were working to get Tucker back into the normal zone, and he had called a cardiologist. With grown-ups they try to get them to hold their breath, or bear-down, or cough hard, and that usually "re-sets" the heart and problem is solved. Its a little different with babies, but they weren't able to get him to cough and he wasn't really responding to the medicine, so they were going to try a different medicine, but we could go back and be with him (this is now about an hour later and his heart has been pounding the whole time). We went to see him, and he was back in the regular NICU set up, and back on oxygen, they were trying to get the pharmacy to mix up this other medicine, and now we're down to about 3 nurses and the Doctor. Just as they're about do set up this other medicine, the cardiologist gets there and says, "wait" he's looking over the EKG and about 2 seconds later says, "he needs to be cardioverted" this is when they take the paddles and zap you. The cardiologist drew us a picture of what was happening, I can't totally explain it, but basically Tucker's heart had this extra little cycle going that was making his heart go faster, and medicine wasn't going to do anything because the cycle was totally electrical. So we had to go out for about 10 minutes, they gave Tucker some "heavy drugs" so that he wouldn't feel anything and they zapped our little baby. It worked. When we got back in to see him he was back to normal on all the monitors and thanks to the medicine he was totally out for the night.

My understanding is that its kind of a rare fluke that it happened, that he happened to be already at the hospital and hooked up to the monitors, and the odds of it ever happening again are very slim. They are giving him a echo this morning, and we haven't heard yet how that went, but its not a structural problem with the heart, and it shouldn't effect him in the future.

For now though, it basically scared us to death, and set Tucker back at least a day.