spoken for

I’ve failed to post a real K update not only because of lack of time, but for the same reason that I simply answer “good” when people ask how she’s doing: oftentimes, explaining her exact situation would take hours. Not that she’s not doing good, of course, she is! It’s just that sometimes it’s hard to explain, but I’ll try…

When I last posted (5-2), she was 2lbs, 12oz. She is now 4lbs, 3oz (as of the night of 5-23). She’s now part of this babyicu.com thing where I can log in and see photos (apparently rarely though) and a graph of her weight. It only charts the last 20 though, so I’m taking screenshots and putting them together, here’s what we have (click to view larger, weight is in grams):

So that’s pretty neat.

K is now on the nasal cannula full time and has been for a while though she is also back on the high humidity. They had taken her off of it to “home” oxygen (I believe it’s called) but she apparently still needed some of the pressure that the high humidity offers and so she went back on that. It’s not a set back, necessarily, it’s just that she wasn’t ready to move forward. The high humidity, though, puts out humid air forced into her nose rather than just having a steady flow of just oxygen, if that makes any sense. She was originally on 5 liters (per minute) but is currently on 4. Hopefully that will continue to go down here soon.

But she’s 35 weeks gestational age so she’s at the point where she’s started to maintain her temperature better (putting on weight helps with that) and is starting to learn to suck, swallow, and breathe all at the same time. So a few days ago, she got out of the incubator and into a crib. It’s so ironic because in our discharge class and elsewhere they talk about how at home you want the baby to sleep on her back with no blankets and nothing in the bed to avoid SIDS. Yet here, they have her bundled up in a blanket with another blanket on top of her with positioners and lots of stuff in her bed and she can sleep on her side or tummy or back. Of course, it’s ok now because she’s on the monitors and surrounded by nurses and doctors, it just strikes me as weird. However, soon they’ll start transitioning her to that back to sleep position all the time.

Last Monday morning, my father-in-law went into the blood bank and donated some blood especially for Kayleigh. The doctors had been saying the previous Saturday that she was probably going to need some blood as her red count was not quite where they wanted it and that they would check later. In other words, it was something she needed but it wasn’t a priority and they expected the blood to be done processing Wednesday. On Tuesday, the blood was ready and they checked her again and she’d actually gone down in her account so they went from a “probably going to need it” to “ok, gotta do it now.” She got half of it Tuesday night and half of it Wednesday night. 16 milliliters over 4 hours each time, so a total of 1 and 1/15 of an ounce. She seems to be doing better now that she’s gotten it. The big issue with her was that with not enough red blood cells, she wasn’t getting enough oxygen. Apparently, red blood cells live about 120 days so hopefully before all these die off her body will be making enough for her.

She’s still feeding with tube now but is starting to learn with the occupational therapist (OT) to take a bottle. We’ve started with this bottle that has a variable nipple that you control with a dial, on level 0, which is more like a pacifier. We dip it in milk then let her suck on it. But the process is very slow going, don’t want to stress her out. She needs to work on her breathing at this time mostly. However, she shows great interest and the OT and I even cracked up when she did the “whole eyes closed but searching for something to suck on so she opens her mouth wide and shakes her head furiously” thing. She had to get a new feeding tube a bit early this past weekend because her PGA came with some blood (PGA is what they suck out of her stomach with a syringe to see how much she’s digested). And, apparently for the first time, she fought it. So that is apparently a good sign as far as bottle feeding goes.

She didn’t like it either, as you can hear!

I guess that’s enough for now, I’ll try to update more, heh. But now it’s time to get a shower as my boys are giving me the present of heading to the hospital alone today while they do Father-Son stuff!

Here are some more photos: