March 24, 2009

With all of the craziness yesterday, Demetri lost weight, but only 4 grams. He had a god night, no apnea events, but did have one as I was walking into his room this morning. His oxygen saturation was 42% (normal is 85-100%). He recovered pretty easily with stimulation and increased oxygen.

He had another busy day with labs and tests. The doctors decided to start ruling out all the possible causes for apnea. Apnea is not a normal finding in a term infant, like it is in a preterm infant. And now that Demetri is 37 weeks gestation, they consider him full term. They did viral cultures to rule out a viral infection; a rapid RSV culture to make sure he does not have RSV; they restarted him on Caffeine, in case the apnea is central apnea (in which the brain does not trigger a respiration in response to increasing CO2 levels in the body); and got an EEG to rule out seizures. In infants, seizures are often subtle, and apnea (and even blinking) may be the only indication.

He tolerated all of these procedures fairly well. He almost finished his bottle at 11am, but we did not get to give him the afternoon bottle because they were putting on the EEG electrodes. I did get to snuggle with him and take a short nap during his NG feeding, which was very nice. Daddy had to stay awake and study for final exams that he is making up this week (wish him luck, the first is tomorrow).

We also found out this morning that the micro array study (chromosome study) that they sent 3 weeks ago did not get processed!!! So we have been waiting for answers from a test that was never run. The nurse practitioner made many calls and I think that they will send another sample to a lab in California and we should be able to get the results back in about a week. We will know more tomorrow. Hopefully this plan will work so we do not have to wait another 3-4 weeks for answers.

We also want to thank everyone for your continued support, thoughts, and prayers. These have been and continue to be very difficult times and we definitely find strength in all of you and that helps us make it through each day.