Our local cardiologist has no idea why we had so much trouble with the pulse oximeter last night.  He was incredibly encouraging – that I did the right thing to check on him and watch for symptoms – seeing none, there was no reason to act.  But it kinda baffled him.

Kiran is looking so good.  The x-ray looked good.  The echo revealed nothing new with his anatomy.  His heart sounded like it should; his pulse by his hands and feet was strong.  He gave absolutely no indication that he is ill or that the pulse ox was in any way accurate last night.

It was confirmed that his oxygen saturation level has come down, in general, however.  They clocked him in at 84, which is in the range of the new normal we are seeing at home.  This was no surprise, though we hate seeing the downward trend starting.

We had a respiratory technician come out tonight and check the pulse oximeter’s functioning.  He reminded us of what to look for on the machine and said it’s a good idea to always test ourselves so we have a baseline to know the machine is working correctly.  We wanted to rule out any machine malfunction, because if tonight goes anything like last night, our cardiologist wants to admit us to the local hospital for monitoring to get to the bottom of this.  We are hopeful we won’t have to do that.  Hopeful that it was just a fluke of a night, and tonight will go smoothly.

Hopeful that I will sleep….