Another step in the right direction

Woo-hoo - Makayla's off the CPAP, for the time being. Don't be surprised if she's back on it tomorrow...but for today...yay! She is on nasal canula oxygen, and she maintains her oxygen level quite well, but she tends to work hard to breathe, so she may need to go back on the CPAP. Her CRP (measures for infection) decreased today, which means the antibiotics are working - another yay!! Her bilirubin has continued to increase (causing jaundice), so she started phototherapy today - she's working on a suntan under the lights. :) She's still not being fed - maybe tomorrow if she continues to improve. Her chest x-ray was fine. Her echocardiogram shows two holes in her heart - but both are very common in preemies. For now, they will just keep an eye on them; if they don't close on their own, surgery may be in her future. Apparently they still don't know what's causing the irregular rhythms, but they are giving her some IV calcium and sodium bicarbonate to try to get her electrolytes better balanced to see if that helps.

Mackenzie has graduated from an open bed to a "condo," aka isolette. Even though it sort of looks worse in the pics, it's actually a good sign - it means she's not as critical and they don't need such immediate access to her. She only lost 6 grams yesterday, which means we can hopefully expect her to start gaining now (all babies lose a certain amount after birth, but so far her loss has been very minimal). She is having some "residuals," which means there is still undigested milk in her tummy 3 hours after her feeding, that they have to suck out with a tube. This afternoon they had us give her Pedialyte for her bottle feeding instead of breastmilk, b/c she had too much residual left from her previous feeding. I think this is just caused by an immature digestive system. Her labs look great - no signs of jaundice or infection at all. Darrell got to hold her for a long time this afternoon after I did her bottle feeding. She was very sleepy and looked so content in his arms.

This morning I had to take my dad to the emergency room, as he was having chest pain and was in atrial fibrillation (for the 3rd time in the last couple months). Fortunately, all it took was some IV medication to correct the heart rhythm, and he was released a couple hours later. He is scheduled to fly home next Saturday, 1/5/08, so we pray his heart doesn't act up anymore and that he can have an uneventful trip home.

I am continuing to struggle with pain and extreme fatigue. Just walking from the parking lot into the hospital today was almost more than I could manage. I'm hoping that a few more nights of good sleep will help; if not, I'm going to call the doc later in the week to have them recheck my hemoglobin level. I was very low going into delivery, and even lower afterwards. My doc talked about doing a blood transfusion, but was hesitant for fear I'd have a reaction, so ended up just putting me on iron 3x/day. But it may just not be adequate - we'll see what happens.