Headed in the right direction...

Yesterday was fairly smooth and pretty uneventful. Emma Kate had an x-ray and lab work very early, around 5 am. That is always lovely to wake up to! I feel so bad for that poor baby who has to get stuck with a needle at 5 am and then she's taken out of her warm, cozy bed and brought out in the hallway with really bright lights to walk downstairs and have this huge machine take a picture of her chest. That is just torture! Brooks and I have been taking turns carrying her down to help make her more comfortable.

We had a visit from the NP (nurse practitioner) yesterday morning to get an idea of our goals for the day. Emma Kate was on continuous feed all day yesterday. They bumped her up from 20 to 24 calorie-per-ounce Portagen. NP said we will be taking it really slow and probably too cautious, but better safe than sorry. So all day she had no throwing up episodes. She's still got a cough and a good bit of mucus in her head (lungs are clear).

Another area that the docs are looking at is her oxygen saturations. Emma Kate's sats look fine when she is awake and active, but when she goes to sleep, she "desats" (oxygen saturations getting lower). The night before last she was getting down into the high 60s, so a small amount of oxygen was turned on and "whiffed" in her face pretty much continuously. That helped her sats go up. But the NP wanted to see how she would do without O2 since she will not have it at home. During the day we've been suctioning out her airways and doing CPT. I think it stands for Chest Physical Therapy maybe? It is fancy for "smacking her on the back trying to open up her lungs."

Emma Kate kind of had her own agenda yesterday. She pulled out her ng tube twice yesterday. The first time, it was early, so we had to put it right back in. The second time was around 7 pm. The nurse decided to leave it out for awhile. EK went to sleep and her sats improved a great deal. I kind of wonder if all that mucus was sticking to the tube and making her sats drop. Her sats ranged from mid 70s up to mid 80s while she was asleep!! When it was time to restart her feedings, we joked with the nurse that we were going to try bottle feeding her... and she got the ok to let us try!!! She is doing ok... not great. The goal is to have her take about 20 ounces every 24 hours. At 2pm they are going to evaluate her progress to see how much more she has to take. And then we will make a plan. We don't know what that plan is right now. It will all depend on her intake by mouth. From 8pm until now (8:45am) she has only taken slightly over 6 ounces. So we have a loooong way to go today. We are going to wake her up for meds in about 10 minutes and then try to feed her some more.

Here is my prayer request today: Please pray that Emma Kate eats and eats and eats via the bottle! We are ok going back on the ng tube feeds if necessary. But it would be SO NICE to have her back on bottle feeds again!

I will be going back to Birmingham today to relieve my mom from babysitting duties. I can't wait to see Anna Brooke! I've missed her so much. She doesn't know I'm coming home today. It will be fun to surprise her. We will go back to get Brooks and Emma Kate when she is ready to come home. Hopefully that will be sooner than later!