2 Months!

Day 61

Today, Emma is two months old!  We are very excited about this milestone.  Emma has been doing just a little bit better lately, although she did have one incident last night.  As soon as I got to the hospital to visit, Emma started de-satting and her heart rate got very low, very quickly.  The doctors and respiratory team were called in immediately and jumped to action to figure out what was going on.  She wasn't responding to the additional oxygen or bagging, so they ended up extubating her and reintubating her with a new tube.  They are not sure why she started to crash so suddenly - at first they thought it might be a clog in her tube, but that looked clear.  Once her new tube was in though, she jumped right back up and was back to her normal self.  The doctors did a chest x-ray to see if they could tell what had happened (such as perhaps a lung had collapsed) but it looked about the same as her previous x-rays.  It's possible that the tube had gotten into a bad position from all her moving and squirming, but everything seems to be back to normal now.  She definitely gave us quite a scare, though!  She's going to have some 'splainin to do when she grows up....

Other than that, she has had some slight reductions in her pressure on the ventilator, which is a good thing, but her oxygen level is still pretty high.  Unfortunately, she had gotten down to 65% before her little "episode" last night, but she's been close to 100% since then.  Her feeds were increased to 8.5 mL/hour to help her pack on the grams.  She had gotten another blood transfusion yesterday, as well as a dose of Lasix to flush out the extra fluids, so she lost ten grams.  But she is still tolerating her feeds very well and everything else is still fine except for the breathing. 

If nothing else, Emma has been teaching us quite a bit about patience.  We know she just needs a lot of time to get big and strong, so we'll just let her take all the time she needs to get better.  We are there for her every step of the way.