Joyce, Kathy, and Holly were on duty yesterday. Joyce had Henry down to .3 liters of flow on his oxygen. Dr. Tsai decided not to do the transfusion. There is some confusion as to whether or not his crit levels really improved. The 23.5 hematocrit levels were based blood work sent down to the lab, but when Holly had done it up in the NICU, the results were 25 last week. They recorded last week's as 23.5. This week, they didn't send it down to the lab and got 25.
I held Henry for a good part of the afternoon. Pod three is full. It is incredibly noisy with background conversations. Joyce had hoped to move him to a crib, but decided against it because of the noise factor. His body temperature has been fine.
Joyce started the compressed feeds at 1PM. This means that his continuous feeds were turned off at 12:30PM. Then, at 1PM, she gave him 30 mls to be given over a 2.5 hour period. She took his blood sugar at 1PM before starting up the feeds, and it remained relatively high (I think it was 67).
We tried breast feeding at 1PM (hoping that the stop on the feeds would make him hungry). He feed a little bit (just a few sucks). We'll keep trying.
Hans stopped by to talk about his liver. Some test results showed that Henry doesn't have enough calcium and phosphate. So they are switching his fortifier from the Enfamil to the Similac (which should meet or exceed his needs). Hans said that Henry will have fragile bones.
Jeff picked me up at the NICU during shift change. We went out to dinner and then came back around 7:45PM. The noise level was high (too many families in pod three chit chatting). The baby next to Henry has alarms going off all the time, so the nurses are desensitized to it and take FOREVER to turn the damn things off. Again, further sleep disruption for Henry. Henry was crying in his isolette when we got there. We changed Henry's diaper before Kathy weighed him. The diaper was huge. Henry was weighed at 1580 grams (so no change since yesterday). Tried nursing again, and he nursed for about a minute. I held him for a while. Then, Jeff held him for a while.
In some good news, the baby girl who makes the screeching pterodactyl noises all the time is going home soon. They really should have put that girl in the isolation room so she wouldn't ruin the atmosphere for everyone else. Her screaming fits wake everyone else up. And sleep is necessary for brain development. The father of the pterodactyl has told the nurses that he doesn't care if she screams as long as she is OK. Easy for him to say that. Meanwhile, she hurting everyone else's quality of life. I asked one of the nurses if she was in pain. They didn't think so; she's just an irritable kid. Again, seems to me that sticking such a child in an isolated area would have been to everyone's benefit.
I called the NICU this morning. Holly said that Henry was doing OK. His oxygen is at .4 liters of flow at 35%. He is still doing some surfing.
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