Generally good news over the past two days.
Yesteday he had a head ultrasound and the results were stable. His head has a sizeable boggy lump of fluid under the skin where the shunt is draining. At this point they think the bleed has stopped completely which means that the shunt is still flowing because residual clotting from the bleed is blocking the path to reabsorption of cerbral spinal fluid. The good news there is that blood clots can disolve in CSF over time so the hope is that the shunt will stop being necessary before he grows out of it. This will likely take months and maintaining stability is what buys us that time.
He is getting milk feeds administered more frequently. Every three hours now he gets about 20ml of milk and they will increase that again at midnight. He gets a little less parenteral nutrition (PN) every time they increase the milk and he may be off the intravenous nutrition all together as early as tomorrow if he keeps pooping and keeps tolerating the increases.
His isolette is on a new setting for larger babies that stays at a constant 83 degrees instead of reading his skin temp and self adjusting to keep at the right temp. Premature babies are particularly bad at self regulating body temp so this graduation is a real vote of confidence in his development.
Once a day we take him out of the isolette for skin to skin time for about two hours. Getting him out and situated is an involved process because of all his wires and air hoses and him being a very tiny baby. Ana and I take turns being the one to hold him each day.
He is still having bradycardia spells (low heartrate), and ocassionally “drifting” (low blood oxygen), and to a lesser extent apnea (holding his breath), but the doctor took time with us yesterday to explain just how very normal and manageable all of that that is for children born at 29 weeks. For us the experience of seeing his vital signs dip is always very scary but the medical team sees it as progress in a way becuase he is off so much of the life supports and medications that were propping his vital signs up.
It was an emotional converstaion with the doctor to hear from her perspective just how very far he has come in the past three and half weeks. In many ways, the further we get, the more we are able to see just how uncertain his prospects were in the first days of his life. The doctor basically told us that we could take a breath, do some self care, and go home at night knowing that we are not in crisis mode anymore. It was good to hear but is easier said than done.
Barnaby 