October 25th: Day 40

Last night they had to adjust one of Ben's vent settings, they had to increase his rate slightly, (rate=breaths/minute), to help him with his oxygen sats as they were sagging a bit. When we visited with him, he just seemed more tired to both Dave and I. After adjusting the rate, it did help him. Dr. Saito came in this morning and did the 2nd surgery to close his incision. She said that he did really well with the surgery. They also changed out his catheter and removed his stitches from his ecmo cannula's that were in his neck. His dopamine has been completely removed, as his blood pressure is staying up where they want it to. He is resting peacefully right now with his daddy holding his hand and hopefully will continue to stay chilled out for the rest of the day. We would like to thank Shannon, Ben's ecmo nurse and girlfriend, for her post the other day. It has touched more people than she will ever know....every one of which said it made them cry, including us. Ben has been very blessed to have such caring nurses and doctors watch over him through all of this. We really couldn't ask for more in that respect. The plan for the rest of today is to let him rest and settle in before the next surgery to close the incision more...they are expecting 2-3 more surgeries this week to accomplish this. As always, we will try to keep everyone posted the best we can. We also wanted to let everyone know that some of my family members are planning a benefit for Baby Benjamin on November 14th at 6pm. We don't have all the details yet, but I will try to put these on the blog asap as I confirm all the details. If you can come, we would really love to see everyone...God Bless everyone for caring so much...