Anthony has become a popular guy at the UMass PICU and I am now the FourSquare “Mayor” of UMass. This means we’ve both been spending way too much time in the hospital. Here is the latest update on Anthony. On Wednesday Anthony began to rally. They had him on several antibiotics and cultured everything imaginable. We are still not sure what was infected, but the docs feel that the PICC line is the most likely culprit. Whatever the case, Anthony is getting better. He started smiling and making noise like the old Anthony.

By Thursday, he looked very good, except for the fact that his airway is quite tenuous. He has a “sweet spot” in his positioning and if he isn’t positioned just right, he goes into respiratory distress, his respirations and pulse go up and his O2 sats go down.

On Friday, we saw even more improvement. His muscle tone is starting to get back to normal. When I say normal, I mean normal for Anthony, which is high tone, due to his CP. But the high muscle tone also seems to improve his airway a bit. At this point, we feel that maybe we can hold off a while on doing a trach, so that he can get his strength back. As we all know, Anthony has been through a lot since December 7th. Now that he is getting better, we don’t want to put him right back in the OR unless we have too. While everyone agrees that Anthony needs a tracheostomy, the doctors have pretty much left the decision of when to trach up to us, so we decided to hold off for as long as we can.

He was no longer sick enough to stay in the PICU and since he was not going to have his surgery right away the question was, should he go to the regular pediatric floor or go home. We felt comfortable taking him home, so he was discharged from the hospital yesterday in “fair” condition.

So, he is home now. We have to watch him and position him very carefully. He is still on antibiotics for a couple more days. His feedings are going well and he seems happy to be home.