Respiratory preemie babies, desaturations, and difficulty making progress
Hello! I had my baby at 25w 1d after spontaneous labour, likely triggered by inflammation from a strep b infection. I went to the hospital in active labour at 4am and he was born at 12pm, so I only had time to have one course of steroids. He was extubated at 27.5 weeks while on a DART steroid course and managed 11 days before his lung collapsed and he had to be reintubated. He did another 12 days on the ventilator, started a DART course, but only had one day's worth of doses as we had to stop feeds and meds due to his lactate going up. That one day of steroids seemed to do enough to get him down from 65% oxygen to 21% oxygen in 36 hours. By day 4 post dose (31 weeks), he was at around 35% oxygen and weaned settings. The team thought it was worth extubating as he was to avoid steroids, and he has now done 24 hours on BIPAP, with good blood gases, but his oxygen requirement is oscillating between 50-65%. He has a PDA that isn't big enough to impact blood flow to his lungs, but he desaturates regularly into the 80s, sometimes the 70s, and occasioanally 60s. Mostly self correcting, not always fleeting (takes him a while). We hope he can sustain this as his lungs recover from ventilator irritation but the dream of getting home by his due date seems further and further away. Has anyone been in a similar situation? When were you able to go home? When did the desaturations get better?