Moving Forward

Hunter is having another fine day. It seems that every day now he is making changes and they are all going in the right direction.

His oxygen levels are still good, they've been consistently under 30% which is fine with me. He is still working at weaning his way off of the ventilator. His breaths per minute setting has been turned down to 42 and he is usually breathing over the machine. Nurse yesterday said that he's begun pulling at the tube in his mouth and when babies do that it is a sign that they are ready to get rid of it.

Doctor is still very eager to get him off of the ventilator. In addition to the albuterol, she says she may occasionally give him doses of caffeine to increase his breathing rate. When I spoke to her today she told me that she thinks that he'll be off of the ventilator in "several days." That's right, she said several days. Not "weeks" or "sometime" or "eventually" or even "when he's ready."

Every day they seem to feed him more and more, and he's taking it all. He's had another increase in his meals, he's now up to 16 ml every three hours. Doctor says that being on TPN (the gatorade bag) for too long causes a certain type of jaundice due to some kind of doctor-talk about the liver. Hunter is showing signs of this jaundice, and it can't be treated with the blue lights he had back when he was small. They do have a medication they can give him to treat it but it requires that he gets a majority of his nutrition from his meals and less from his TPN. Doctor feels that we're getting to the point where he is eating a sufficient amount of food and is going to start him on this treatment soon.

A little while ago I wrote about him coming out of his isolette and moving into a baby crib. It doesn't sound now as though it's going to be happening for quite a while. I asked Doctor about it while I had her on the phone earlier today. She says that before a baby is removed from the isolette they need to hit pretty much every other milestone. They need to be eating well, steadily gaining weight, and breathing without the vent. He'll probably be in his enclosed bed until about two weeks before he gets to come home. We'll still get to hold him before then though, as soon as he is off of the ventilator Mommy and I can pick him up.