day 7: "eating"

Jules had a good day today. Some recent pictures of Jules and Gigi.

His PDA is closed. That's good news since it means that concerns around respiration (or sufficient oxygen/co2) are addressed and it also means that blood that might have been flooding the lungs went to profuse his gut.

He started "eating." The blood profusing his gut meant that he could try eating today. So they started giving 1 cc of "EBM" (expressed breast milk) every 2 hours. That's 0.034 fluid ounces. The way they feed him is by sticking a tube down his throat to his stomach and squiriting in the EBM. Then they wait a little bit and then use a syringe to suck out what's in his stomach. If they see less than what the put in they call it success. And in his case he digested all but a tiny little bit.

His aterial line is coming out. In other posts I mentioned that Jules has an umbilicalarterial line called his UAC. UACs are great for taking continuous blood presures and measuring blood gases. However if you pulled it out he would bleed out or exsanguinate for those doctor types. So that's one reason they don't like folks to hold kids with UACs. His UAC his coming out tomorrow morning. Following that, we're hoping to hold him for the first time.

CPAP coming in a few days. He's basically been breathing room air (no additional oxygen) and they've lowered the PEEP (pressure at the end of the tube located just above where his wind pipe splits to go down to each lung) and they've lowered the tidal volume (the volume of air they push in on each breath) and they've lowered the machine respirations (because he's "breathing over" the machine -- aka he's breathing more frequently than the machine). For all these reasons they think he might be able to graduate to the less invasive CPAP. Think pressurized nose-mask.

Also, Uncle Kirk (Joy's Brother) and Grampop Silver (My Dad) visited. Nana (Joy's Mom) is coming tomorrow.

Joy is healing well. Unfortunately they forgot a staple on the incision, which we had removed this morning. She's feeling a lot better.

Shabbat Shalom.