Gestational Age: 33 weeks 2 days
Weight: 1620 grams
Today Madelyn had two spells, one at 3 am and another at 10 am. For those that are not familiar with these, a "spell" is where her heart rate drops as well as her oxygen saturation. Usually when this happens, the alarms go off and someone (a nurse or myself usually) has to massage or rub her to get her numbers to return to normal. This is caused by her premature brain "forgetting" to breathe. It is also increased by her congenital heart disorder, patent ductus arteriosus (PDA). Madelyn has been doing well with not having spells for awhile, but this could be related to her moving down on her cannula yesterday. I think sometimes we fail to realize that she is still almost 7 weeks premature at this point. Maddie shouldn't even have to be thinking about breathing yet and she won't be perfect. I also had sort of put her PDA in the back of my mind until her spells today because I've been so focused on her intestines. Maddie was doing well for the entirety that Dan and I were at the hospital today.
The nurse practitioner came by Madelyn's room today and informed me that the surgical team would like to start mixing Neocate into her breast milk to help her digest better. Much of her output from her ostomy has looked like breast milk that is not very well digested. I am concerned about this because of her getting NEC shortly after starting the increased calorie mix with the breast milk. Mom and I will be talking to the doctors on rounds tomorrow morning. On the positive side, there was one feeding today where Maddie only had a 1 mL residual! That's a big improvement over previous feedings. She also had one where it was 2.8 mLs, so it didn't exactly show an overall improvement.
The biggest news of the day is that when I changed Maddie's diaper around 2 pm today, something looked different and it took me a second to realize it was because her umbilical cord stump had fallen off and was sitting on her incision site. I congratulated Maddie on a job well done for removing it (her mother may have poked at it yesterday to see how well it was "stuck" there). It looked really sort of nasty, so in typical me-fashion, I took a picture and sent it to people. Why should I be the only one to enjoy the disgusting-ness of it?
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We held Maddie again tonight during her 6 pm feeding. Dan is doing so well learning how to hold her and feeling more at ease with holding her. We have completely different jobs as parents right now. His job is to make sure she is getting enough intellectual stimulation through music and literature. My job is to handle all the medical information, keep track of things, provide nutrition, as well as instill in her a love of the Yankees. Actually, Dan is not overly supportive of the Yankees part, but I think part of him has just accepted that she will need to be a Yankees fan. We both are awesome at the love and cuddling part.
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