Day 13

Avery is still loving the swaddle and has had a fairly stable couple of days.  She is not doing neoprofin at the moment and they are slowly reintroducing food to her daily schedule, but they did need to use dopamine to help her kidneys produce urine.  When I read to her today, the nurses watched her oxygen saturation numbers get up strong enough to where they actually needed to wean off her oxygen a bit.  I love hearing that - I discussed it with a brother in law earlier and realized it's the only form of parenting I do that has quantifiable results!

Wren had a pretty hard night last night.  She started to take a turn for the worse when her blood pressure started to drop to the level where it was no longer detectable by the equipment, and her heart rate went up to compensate.  She also stopped peeing last night, so they suspected she may have an infection somewhere.  We were warned that infections can potentially be devastating, so of course they watch this stuff really closely.  The nurses got a swab from her mouth, some from her tubing that goes into her lungs, and started her on a dopamine to try and help get her to urinate to take a sample of that as well.  It surprisingly didn't take too long for the people in the lab to observe a growing bacteria culture, confirming an infection in her lungs.  Her body seemed to be trying to fight the infection which helps account for the adverse symptoms the nurses had been struggling with.  The doctor recommended giving her a treatment of Nitrous Oxide gas in the lungs.  This doesn't fight the infection, they'll give antibiotics for that, it just helps enlarge the blood vessels around the lining of the lungs to make oxygen transfer easier and help her lungs to be slightly more effective during the course of the infection.  By the afternoon, she started to stabilize a bit, and by the evening when she was receiving the NO gas, her saturation levels improved further, though she's still on a pretty high oxygen level of 65%.  That's up a lot from her level of 30% a couple of days ago.  The goal on oxygen is to move toward 21%, which is the same oxygen level as the air we breathe.

Here is a sample of (some) of the equipment Wren is hooked up to.  There's an IV to the left and system monitors, and on the right side of the isolette the ventilator machine she's currently on, the NO equipment, a humidity machine and other stuff to monitor respiratory levels:


Clean
It can be a bit scary to have a 1 pound baby with an infection.  Whenever you come to visit your baby in the NICU, you go through a process where you check in and then spend a couple of minutes thoroughly soap scrubbing your hands and arms up to your elbows.  After a couple of minutes you head into the room, but if you touch anything else with your hands like your phone you need to apply some hand sanitizer prior to opening an isolate to touch one of the babies.  Even despite all the precautions it sounds like it's somewhat common for micro-premies to get infections.  With the care required to keep our bodies clean and sickness free, I can't help but think that there's a great spiritual analogy here.