Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Long road with many steps

Life in the NICU is a long road with many steps. There is still a lot of growing and developing Sadie needs to do before she gets to come home. We still expect her to be in there for a month or more. The good thing is that she is consistently making progress.

Respiratory System:
She has gone from a CPAP with oxygen levels in to 30% range down to 21% (same as normal air). Then she graduated to a nasal cannula. She's currently between 21-30% oxygen at 2 liters of pressure. The next step is to lower the pressure to 1 liter. This may happen tomorrow or the next day. Then when she is breathing fine for a day or two on the cannula with 21% oxygen and 1 liter of pressure, they'll try removing the cannula. The trick is to give her just enough support for her respiratory system to grow and develop without creating stress on Sadie.

Feeding:
She's currently eating 5cc's of milk every three hours. She has been doing well with this so they will most likely start increasing the amount they feed her tomorrow. They will continue increasing the amount and eventually she will graduate to being bottle fed. The danger with going to the bottle to quickly and it can have an effect on the respiratory system as Sadie may be concentrating on eating too much and forget to breathe. "Suck-Swallow-Breathe" is one of the main things Aedan has to master before he was able to come home.

Heart:
Looks like we are out of the woods for the most part on this front. Her hole (PDA) closed successfully with the first set of indocin. The only residual "problem" is a slight heart murmur. The name for this has escaped me, but it was caused when the hole closed. The closing of the hole created a small part of the heart that is a bit thicker than it should be. This causes a little turbulence in the heart, thus the murmur. This will work itself out as the heart grows and will not prevent Sadie from coming home. The cardiologist said the Sadie's pediatrician will be notified and will follow up as Sadie gets older.

Final Thoughts:
We're adjusting to life at home with Aedan again. I can tell he likes being home, although he did enjoy his sleepovers with Grandpa/Grandpa and Nanny/Papa. He is an extremely well balanced kid and we are very thankful that he did so well being away from us as much as he was. Jen's walking quite well but sleeping is still a core. The pelvis pain still is occurring when she lays on her side or turns over in bed. Please pray that she's able to sleep well and that the pain continues to subside whether she's walking, sitting, or laying down. Well, it's time for bed. Thanks again for all your prayers and well wishes - they mean the world to us.

1 comment:

Miriam said...

Hola,

Great news about Sadie's progress.

We are all behind you in prayer support. Thanks for keeping us inform. Big kiss for Aedan, he is a great guy.
We love you all, carinos

Miriam