Tuesday 1/30

What a great night! Even with the hiccup of the 4am EKG and extra lab draw and the sounds of doctors voices in my room at 2, 4 & 6 am which is TERRIFYING, we are doing good. Both Gideon and I slept the majority of the night and the EKG and lab results were both good! He is throwing some ‘PAC’s’ (premature atrial contractions) but they seem to be benign and everything else with his heart is looking good so they are just going to monitor that and make sure it doesn’t change.

They started weaning him off of the cardiac medication last night that he needs to get off and went down from .5 to .4 and there was no change with him which is fantastic. The last 5-6 times we have tried to wean him off, he didn’t tolerate even that small of a switch so apparently the new cardiac drug they have him on for the wean is doing it’s work.

They increased his feeds (via NG tube) today because he hasn’t grown at all since he’s  been here, he is still 5 lbs 2 oz and he needs to GROW to get healthy so the increase calories and volume alternately every other day. Today he gets more volume, tomorrow he gets added calories/protein in his milk and they will keep increasing and hope he eats well, rests well and has a growth spurt. They think he may be growing right now because he slept most of the day yesterday and all night long, he had increased feeds yesterday and he took 5 ml by mouth this morning when we did ‘binkie training’ and he did great then went right back to sleep. They like to see him eat a lot and sleep a lot so I guess that’s a good thing!

It’s a slow process but we are taking baby steps in the right direction. Thank you for the continued prayers & encouragement, please keep them coming especially as we switch out and I head home to be with the big boys and Bo comes up here to be with Gideon for a few days. The days up here are getting busier now that we (the parents – not the nurses) get to feed him 4x per day and we are encouraged to snuggle him at least 2x per day. I always feel so bad for the nurses because it takes nearly a half hour to get him out of his bassinet to snuggle for a bit and about 45 min to get him settled back in and unwound from all the cords, wires & cables but they are so kind about it, the still encourage us to do that even though it adds a ton of work for them. Between feeding and snuggling, the nurses don’t even have time to do all their safety checks and vitals every 2 hours

Specific prayers:

• Gideons cardiac output improves
• His NIRS scores improve
• He gets FAT
• Complete healing for the whole family, we need to stay rested, healthy & well so please pray for that!

THANK YOU!!!!