friday 6/21/2013

What a great day for Ava. She passed her esophagram -yay!!  Her lab values are looking better. At about 8pm tonight surgery finally pulled her chest tube. She has been weaned off the rate on the CPAP breathing machine. Now they will work on weaning the pressure, so that she can move to a high flow nasal cannula and then back to a regular nasal cannula. She got her pacifier back -double yay! She has been alert and awake most of the day. It's like she's making up for lost time. I finally got to hold her about 10pm, skin to skin. She still lay there awake just listening to me talk to the nurse and was still awake when I left at midnight. Her NG feeds of breastmilk were restarted at 10mls every 3 hours, and should increase back to the 60mls over the next few days. At the same time the TPN  (artificial nutrition through the veins) will be weaned. She is still getting the morphine every 3 hours and will probably be weaned from that soon as the infection clears up more. I am hoping she gets moved to a regular crib next week- then we'll be able to put more items for her to look at in there. Right now she just has a mirror and the baby doll "Ivy" that I got her...which she loves to look at. We got lots of smiles out of her today. It should be a good weekend for recovery. I have no idea what the next step is. I imagine we'll try bottle feeds again when she gets back to a nasal cannula for breathing.We'll see how much she'll be able to take that way, but we may be looking at getting a G-tube directly into the stomach to supplement her feeds to get her home faster. This is pretty common...and of course requires another surgery.