Close Call

We got off to a scary start this morning. When our night nurse left at 6 am, I checked on Will and noticed he was making kind of a raspy sound that I'd never heard before. But his oxygen sats were good and his color was good and he was sleeping peacefully, so I let it go. An hour later I heard crying loudly and I knew something was wrong. A child with a trach can't cry loudly because air doesn't get to their vocal cords, so if you hear them at the volume of a regular baby, something's wrong. When I went in I couldn't figure out what was wrong. His trach was in, his sats were fine and his color was fine, but his chest was pulling when he breathed and he sounded raspy. I thought he might need a breathing treatment, so I gave him one. It helped some, but he still sounded pretty wheezy. Then Matt noticed his humidifier was off.
Now, the humidifier is probably the most crucial piece of equipment to a trached child. Since Will doesn't breathe through his nose, he can't humidify air himself. Without humidified air, the secretions in his trach will dry up and form a mucous plug which blocks the trach. This can be, and often is, deadly. Once we realized that the humidifier had been off for God knows how long, we decided to change the trach to be safe. After replacing it, I found that the tube was completely blocked with a mucous plug. Thank God he has enough space around the tube that he was breathing around it. That's why we could hear him cry so loud. It is truly for the grace of God that this did not kill our child.
We have no idea how the humidifier got turned off. We know we turned it on after the doctor's visit because we had to adjust the settings to get the temperature right. This machine is hard to turn off and on, you can't "accidentally" turn it off. The only thing we can figure is that the night nurse turned it off for some unknown reason and forgot to turn it back on.
Luckily all's well that ends well. Will is absolutely fine and the rest of the day turned out quite nicely. But we will be checking that humidifier like crazy from here on out!