Surfing Again

On Wednesday afternoon, Jeff arrived about an hour after I left. My mom was there. Jeff held him until shift change.

Holly was Henry's nurse on Wednesday night. She weighed him at 1480 grams. Jeff held him for a while again. Henry had a good night.

Yesterday, Jen was Henry's day nurse again. Henry had been doing a little surfing. I held Henry for a couple hours. He didn't seem as crazy about the skin-to-skin. He was a little fussy. I ended up cradling him. After I left in the afternoon, my mom came and held him for a few hours.

Before I left, I ran into Hans, Henry's resident. Hans spent about half an hour with me talking about Henry's progress. We looked through some of Henry's old x-rays. We went through the ultrasound reports. It's unclear whether Henry really had a brain bleed back in May or whether that it was a measurement artifact. If it was a bleed, it was really small (6mm by 5mm on 5/8 and 4mm by 3mm on 5/15) in the cerebellum. Hans showed me Henry's most recent chest x-ray. You can actually see some tissue there. And finally, we looked at his abdominal x-rays because I wanted to see what the NEC looked like. I was curious because when we talked with Dr. Wispe on 6/18, he wasn't convinced that Henry had had NEC. Based on what I saw, there are some bubble like things on the x-ray but it doesn't look like it was in the lining. And it disappeared by the following x-ray. Hans said that Dr. Tsai said that such a pattern could be stool in the bowels, which people sometimes confuse as pneumatosis (bubbles). This is of course frustrating to find out now because the whole NEC incident put Henry two weeks back on nutrition. He was given TPN during that time, but one doesn't really gain weight on TPN. It's hard to grow with it. Looking back on 6/11, Henry showed no signs of distress other than a few As and Bs and a CRP test, which suggested infection, but the other tests didn't. Several doctors don't believe in the CRP test.

Jeff and I went to Babies R Us last night...just to get a sense of what's out there. Then, we headed to the NICU around 9PM. Ashley was Henry's evening nurse. She has taken care of him before...several weeks ago. She had weighed Henry at 1510 grams.

Jeff tried doing skin-to-skin with him, but Henry was pretty fussy. Jeff tried cradling him. Again, Henry was fussy. Then, I tried holding him. We ended up putting him back because he was doing some major surfing. His oxygen was at .5 liters of flow at 30%.

Henry did much better when he was put back in his isolette. I don't know if his surfing is brought on by too much stimulation today or not having his caffeine anymore.

I called the NICU this morning. Jen reported that Henry had done a lot of surfing through the night, so Ashley wasn't able to wean down his flow of oxygen.

Our plan for the day is to do less holding because Penny wanted to show us how to give him a bath this afternoon. We suspect that the bath will wipe out his energy reserves. We'll have to see how he's doing this afternoon.