Some excitement today

Overall, Mason's condition has not changed much over the past few days. The swelling in his body has gone down quite a bit, and that is about it. The next hurdle for Mason is to get off of the heart-lung bypass (ECMO). In order to do that he must start by getting closer to his birth weight by continuing to lose the fluids built up in his system. After that he will go through several trials where the doctors increase his respirator volume and see how he does off of ECO on a short, temporary basis. Once his body can sustain life without ECMO for a cerain amount of time on the trials then he will be taken off ECMO for good.

There was a bit of excitement today. First he lost some blood when the syringe removing blood from the ECMO circuit (to have blood tests run) came off of the circuit causing him to lose quite a bit of blood. His heartrate jumped quite a bit and his blood pressure went down as well. However, after he received more blood he returned to his normal state within a few hours.

The other excitement today was that the ECMO circuit started to get some blood clots in it today. This is pretty normal and is expected to happen about once a week. To remedy that situation they had to take him off of his ECMO machine and hook him up to a new machine. The medical staff has this procedure down to a science, and he was only off of ECMO for less than two minutes. He reacted well, however changing systems does introduce a lot of new fluids into his system so his swelling will increase for the next day or so until his body can process the fluids.