May 28, 2009

This is how we found Demetri's bed today when we walked in,
then we looked down and found this...

Demetri has finally made it to 5 lbs!!! He is actually outgrowing some of the preemie clothes now and I have washed the newborn clothes and taken them to his room.

We have had some ups and downs this week. Over the weekend, Demetri made it to the low end of full continuous feedings. And he seemed to be tolerating them fine, then Tuesday when they increased the feedings to 11.5 ml/hour he started having desaturations and bradycardia. These happened through the night and he needed some oxygen by nasal cannula give him a greater flow of air to help him with the shallow breathing. I think the consensus now is that he was not tolerating the larger volume and it took a little while for his stomach to get used to it. After holding at that volume for another day and taking off the nasal cannula, they were able to increase him to a final volume of 13.5 ml/hr.

Demetri has lost weight the past 2 days (only 7 grams) so they are adding calories to his milk. He is back up to 26 calories/ounce breastmilk, like he was before surgery. Hopefully this will help him start gaining weight as well as before, but it may take a couple of days to see the results.

The final step to getting him home is to compress his feedings to an hour so that we are giving him bolus feedings every 3 hours, rather than continuously. Then the plan is to do the bolus feedings during the day and do continuous feedings at night so he can sleep throught the night (which he already does... thank you nurses!). So we had feeding pump training this afternoon from the home health rep.

Please keep your fingers (and toes) crossed that all goes well then next few days. Hopefully Demetri will be able to come home next Wednesday or Thursday!