Thursday Evening, June 30th - Day 11 update

Tori's day began to a little bit on the rough side as a new physical therapist arrived and pushed Tori quite a bit in her stretching. While she stretched Tori's hamstrings her face grimmaced with pain and turned very red and the tears followed closely after that. Maria and I could hardly stand to watch it... Tori obviously feels pain and the stretching and manipulating of her arms and legs is very neccessary to keep her muscle tone in place. But I am defintely not near as rough on her when I apply the physical therapy myself... The term "feel the burn" has a whole new meaning to me now.

Tori's breathing tube was removed from her mouth at approximately 11:45am today. This process is called extubation. About 6 doctors and nurses helped and observed her in the process. Tori did well on her breathing and coughing but she was lacking the consistent swallowing and ability to produce a gag. The medical team let her breath on her own for about 15-20 minutes as they watched her throat response. It was finally deemed that her upper respitory control was not far enough along to keep the tube removed. The risk of saliva getting down into her lungs was too great and the doctors really don't want her to get a pneumonia at this point. Her lungs have recovered to full capacity and they don't want to risk them getting 'sick' again.

So the team determined they needed to intubate her again. Tomorrow we will discuss with the doctors the next steps which would be to either try again in a couple of days or go directly to the Tracheotomy.

Tonight we went down to Orem for The Dance Club Company Showcase but we called the nurses and Tori has been awake for most of the late evening.