As i'm sure you can imagine, and as we have been told time and time again, this experience is a real rollercoaster. Just as soon as you allow yourself to relax slightly, something big happens.
On Sunday night Jacob and Lilian were promoted to the High Dependency part of the neonatal unit, and are now both in normal cots.
This is where the fun started........
Over the past few days Jacob has gone from trying a bottle every now and then, to having his feeding tube completely removed (on Doctor's orders!) and having every feed by bottle. He was doing tremendously, but seems to have picked up a bit of a cold bug and after 48 hours of taking a bottle every 3 hours, he became too tired to feed himself at every mealtime. He's currently taking about 2 out of 3 feeds by bottle and the third one goes through his tube.
Due to Jacob's cold his oxygen has come up slightly. He had been able to manage in a round 0.03 litres of oxygen and remain very stable at his best, but is currently using around 0.08 to 0.2 litres. This still isn't a massive amount, and so long as he remains under 0.5 litres, he could come home on any of those other amounts of oxygen. It's just a shame to see him needing more when he had moved beyond this stage and the Doctors were hoping to try him in air at the beginning of the week.
Although Jacob's 'setback' is par for the course, a real concern this week has been Lilian.
Lilian has started to have Apnea 'episodes'. This is where she stops breathing for a period of time, and depending on how long the episode lasts and how well she can cope, depends on the kind of intervention she needs. The first few times she did this were relatively minor and were pretty much over as soon as they began. However, Wednesday and Thursday she had a couple of more prolonged episodes which meant that she needed help from the Nurses to stimulate her and get her breathing again.
The Doctors and Nurses have reassured us that this is very common is preterm babies, and as Lilian was a little aneamic, this was making the episodes more likely. It was decided that due to her aneamia she needed another blood transfusion on Thursday and she has perked up somewhat since and managed a full bottle this morning (she had barely opened her eyes since being moved to HDU, and certainly hadn't touched a bottle), although her Apnea episodes haven't gone away just yet. We've been advised that she will grow out of it, but for the timebeing we have to get used to seeing sights that we didn't think we would be seeing again now that they are out of intensive care. Just to make things worse for Lilian, she also seems to have a cold so is having to cope with a lot at the moment.
Due to the babies sniffles (and the sniffles of other babies on the unit), and routine infection control, tests have been carried out to make sure that the babies have nothing more than a cold, and the results were as pleasing as they could be - they have the common cold!
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