Sunday, October 30th, 2005

Time	Event
1:51a	:) Tovar no longer looks like a shrivelled little old man, and is now looking like a baby, complete with baby fat ;) I somewhat regret now not getting pictures in his earlier state... the little old man look was kind of cute, especially with how expressive his face was, harder to see the nuances behind all that fat plus tubes now ;) But that said, I'm *much* happier now that he's looking healthier and happier. Hopefully this continues. His weight Friday was 1180 grams, although he had a big overnight growth spirt and I bet he weighs a fair bit more than that by now. I was very impressed with how different he looked today than yesterday, his head in particular has gotten noticeably larger. This is probably related to the fact that he's been sleeping more, and more deeply during the past couple of days. Its a huge relief to see him really out, although annoying that it seems to cause him to have more apneas and therefore other types of episodes as well. (he stops breathing for a little bit, then his oxygen saturation goes followed by his pulse). As the nurses say, its hard for premies to remember to breath, and I guess its harder to remember when out cold sleeping. But at least he has a good nurse tonight to give him a vigourous rub when he needs to be reminded. (1 Comment | Comment on this)
10:34p	sigh Tovar's CRP test came back high. The nurse thought this probably means he has an infection, although they're doing another blood culture and spinal tap (testing for inflamation along the spinal cord and in the head) which will give the real answer, and tell us where the inflamation is if he has one. The early nurse said that he seemed to be responding well to the antibiotics, although I just got back from holding him and he had a pretty major episode, among a few usual smaller ones, so I'm not really all that sure. Yesterday he had a lot more episodes, but most were pretty small. In general though, I've been noticing more of the bad ones over the past few days. They're infrequent, but the drops are lower than I'd seen before. The NICU alarms go off for oxygen desaturation when the baby dips below 80 for more than a few seconds. A good range is mid 90's to mid 80s, if it goes up to 100 and stays there for a while they'll usually turn down the oxygen a bit. I used to be alarmed when it went into the high 70s, but that's fairly normal these days. Just now, totally out of the blue when he was satting fine, it went all the way down to 35 and he turned grey, and it took us a little while to get him back: he'd go up a little, then he'd have a bad bradycardia, then the sat would drop again... he turned a bit grey yesterday during a bad episode too. Apparently what I took as a good sign yesterday: that he was really out sleeping, the nurse realized as a sign that he was having problems. I guess its okay for him to sleep pretty deeply for a while, but he should get more active when being moved around, and more figety in general. He was more active today, so hopefully that does mean that he's doing better in general. He actually smiled at me several times this afternoon... he's got a beautiful smile :) I hadn't seen him smile since that one time his first week. I think its mostly because I can't see his face when I hold him on my chest, which is when other people have seen him smile, and even when doing the bed hold its been really hard to see much with all the tape and tubes all over him, but now that his head is a bit bigger his expressions are a bit more visible, although he can still only smile with one side since he's got the feeding tube going down his throat from the other. At least he likes the feeding tube though, he sucks on it like a pacifier, which makes me happy because it makes him happy and he gets to keep it for at least as long as he has the cpap. (once he gets off of the nose tubes they'll probably put the feeding tube back down his nose so that they can do things like give him a regular pacifier more easily and perhaps give breastfeeding a try) Current Mood: tired, sad, worried (4 Comments | Comment on this)

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