NICU Day 18

I decided not to visit tonight in the hopes that I could get a little more rest.  I think I may get as much as an extra hour of sleep out of this, which is awesome.  I really love the idea of giving Baby Girl's feed over the course of 2 hours instead of 30 minutes.  I am very hopeful that it will help with her spells.  After about 12 hours (which is 4 feeds) the nurses feel that she is handling it better.  As an added bonus, when they weighed her this evening, she'd gained 30 grams, which is one whole ounce!

Dr Caldwell called with our update

• One of the nurses noted that Baby Girl's alarms occur the hour before and after she eats.  AAs an experiment, they are going to try infusing the feeds over 2 hours to see of it lowers alarms.  The alarms are why we are on NIPPV, so decreasing or eliminating those would be fantastic and help us move back towards CPAP.  They will go back to 30 minute feeds later when she's bigger if this helps with alarms.  This experiment will last at least a few days.
• I asked again about adding protein into her feeds.  I said that I gained weight slow as did my son, we both had other reasons (cardiac defects) but maybe part of it was genetic.  She said given that Baby Girl's labs that tell us how she's handling protein are both high normal (BUN and Creatinine), they think they will hold off on the protien. Some babies pick up their weight gain after they hit a kilogram (2.2 lbs) and then pick up even more as they grow, we're hoping she'll fall in that category.  She's currently gaining 10 grams or so, ideally, they'd like to see 18 grams. 

850 grams (up 30 g) - 1 lb 14 oz

Milk: 868 ml (29.8 oz)

Day Nurse: Lori (Still loving the Halloween scrubs, bummed I didn't get to show her my Halloween socks!)

Night Nurse: Ashley