Stupid machines!

Last night a home care nurse visited to see if anything could be done about the pressure sores that Raphael has been getting on his forehead from the CPAP mask.

Fortunately when she was visiting she also noticed some of the problems that we had been having with the oxygen monitor. She ended up going to get another one and taking the faulty one away.

Last night was not a good night in terms of alarms. Even with the new Oxygen monitor the alarms came thick and fast from the machine last night. Raphael is sick with a cold but was not having bad desaturations; he was coughing a lot which caused him to move which, in turn, resulted in faulty readings for the Oxygen monitor.

At about 3:00am we gave him some infant cough medicine (Demazin). We also turned him onto his other side and within thirty minutes his saturation monitor showed better readings and he did not wake up for the rest of the night.

While we were having problems with the probes at night we tried something new. Rather than move a probe when it was causing problems, we simply added another one to another foot or hand and connected it to the machine to see if the new location would be any better. In the morning I discovered the problem to this approach: Raphael had manage to tightly bind his feet together and was working on tying his hand probe tail to the NGT chord. It took me ages to get him untangled and at one point I too managed to connect myself to the octopus of chords and Elastoplast tape.