Several Good Days

After all the ups and downs of the past week, Milo and Madeline are enjoying a couple of relatively stable days. Madeline's lungs are now uniformly processing oxygen, which means her vent and the repositioning regimen worked well. Her oxygen levels have been pretty moderate (high 30s to mid 40s). She is also recovering well from her surgery. She is off the dopamine and they are slowly weaning her off her morphine. She started getting breast milk again yesterday - 3 ml every 3 hours - and so far has been tolerating that well. They removed the dressing from her incision and it is healing nicely. She has three little stitches, but the scar is barely visible. I was able to talk and sing to her for about 15-20 minutes yesterday without any desaturations, and Rob did some successful containment holding and talking with her in the evening. This is a nice change, since for the past several days if you even looked at her sideways she'd go nuts. They literally had stop signs on her room door so that unnecessary people weren't walking in and talking or moving around in there. So, she's doing much better.

Milo is also doing well and has been down in the 20s on his oxygen levels, which is great. He is adjusting to the oscillating vent and has been having fewer temper tantrums. (Even though he can't make noise because he's intubated, he will cry up a storm when he's mad, flailing his arms, grimacing and making his heart rate rise. We calm him with music and containment holding. Her really likes Baby Einstein Mozart, which his nurse Sandra plays for him on her Iphone.) Temper tantrums are a good sign, though, as it means he still has a lot of vim and vigor. :) Milo is getting 2 ml of breast milk every 3-4 hours and is responding pretty well to that level of feeding. He is also able to tolerate talking, singing, and some containment holding now, which he wasn't as able to deal with for the past few days.

We're thrilled both babies are getting breast milk now so they can grow, grow, grow!

No word on next steps with the ventilators yet. The next step down would be to put them on conventional vents rather than the oscillating/jet vents, but we were told by the babies' doctor that they will be on the vents of one kind or another for several weeks.