Day 20

We had a great Sunday with our girls today, thanks to my sister in law for watching our kids most of the day.  Shannon got to hold Avery and I got to hold Wren at the same time, and they both did great.  My sister Season showed up and was able to visit with us.  It looks like Wren had her first good news of the week -- this morning's x-rays showed that her left lung was getting a bit more oxygenated than the previous shots showed, and that the damage in her lungs hasn't spread any further since yesterday.  That tiny little piece of good news seemed huge to us, so we choose to hold on to it and continue to hope and have faith that things could go well for her.    Really though, we know that at this points she is completely in God's hands.  Wren also has been on a helium-oxygen mixture mixed in with her normal air to see if it would help.  It did not appear to, so they turned that off today.

Avery did pretty well today, and has kind of started digesting the food she's given again, and that's a good sign.  She is scheduled for another echo tomorrow morning to see whether the Tylenol is helping with her PDA, and at the same time they will check her blood to ensure the drug is not causing problems for her liver.  She seemed a little more uncomfortable than usual today.  They are worried that she might become resistant to the effects of Morphine, so they started her on a new drug whose name I don't remember.

All of this treatment for these babies is a continuous, delicate balancing game.  It requires a lot of back and forth with slow trends in up and down directions.  The doctors and nurses make constant changes to settings on her ventilator and IV equipment, changes in how they're facing, changes in how much they eat, changes to medicine doses they receive.  All of this happens to try to make sure that the baby gets to a more stable state when they can focus simply on feeding and growing to the point where they can "graduate" and leave the NICU.  We look forward to that day.