August 2, 2007

I visted Jordan yesterday after not visiting on the 31st. I heard from the nurses that he was off of the blood pressure medication and holding stable on his own. The last time I saw him, he had 4 I.V.s in him - one in each arm and each leg. I was hoping that they would be able to take one of them out because he was no longer on the dopamine. When I saw him yesterday he was down to one I.V! The doctor mentioned last week that they would attempt to feed him once he stabilized his blood pressure, but I wasn’t expecting anything to happen yesterday until they resolved his heart PDA (more on that later). He had one I.V. for his lipids (fats) and he was being fed with a tube directly into the stomach. He’s so young that they aren’t really feeding him. They are giving him a couple of CCs over a couple of hours, and they are giving it to him about the rate of an I.V. drip, but it’s going into his stomach. When the babies are this young, the digestive system isn’t on yet. They turn it on by putting a very small amount of food in and seeing how he tolerates it. Best case means he processes the food normally, and he works his way up to more and more food. Worst case, his stomach does nothing, the milk starts to ferment and they have to suck out the contents before he gets an infection. Of course we won’t know until later today how he tolerates it.
Right now he just has the one I.V. and a ventilator to help him. Everything else is just sensors. He was looking like a little baby instead of a sick hospital patient. They even turned him on his stomach! He got to curl up into the fetal position for the first time since the day he was born. This is exactly why I say only look 3 days into the future. After seeing where he has been, I can truly appreciate where he is. I got to turn my son over for the first time, when I remember days I couldn’t even touch him. He is cuurently off of the sugar water, a week after his doctor thought he would die. A week ago he was using all of his calories just hanging on. Now, for at least a few days, he can use the calories to grow. There is no looking beyond this weekend. I just want to spend as much time as possible to appreciate what he has done so far. I’m not worried about bottles, or coming home, or any of that crap. I’m just happy that for the first time in 22 days, I got to see my son’s back.
I was wrong about my prediction for the PDA. I predicted they would have done the damn test by now and not told us the results yet. It turns out they haven’t done the test yet! They are doing the test today, and assuming that there is nothing major, we probably won’t get the results back until next week. Beleive it or not, that is actually what I’m hoping for. The only way we get the results back quickly is if the doctor wants to close the hole manually. He isn’t having any complications or symptoms right now, so maybe the doctor decides that it has improved enough so that we can leave it alone until he gets a little bigger. Again, no reason to look beyond getting the results back. That’s Monday at the latest. Naturally, I’ll keep you updated.