2lbs and Growing

So Charlotte has finally joined her siblings in surpassing 2lbs in weight. It's been a long time coming (and she might dip below again), but I think she's off to the races at this stage. According to the attending physician, "Charlotte doesn't know that she has a PDA." In other words, she's totally asymptomatic. As I said yesterday, she's the strong one.

Thomas and Audrey, on the other hand, are both showing signs of their PDAs. Apparently, blood transfusions are good for almost everything...they actually make PDAs worse. Higher blood flow makes the opening larger. And both of them recently had transfusions. So there's that. They both are going to have echocardiograms and chest X-rays to assess the extent of the problem. In the mean time, they started on diuretics. I know Audrey was on Lasix, so I'm assuming that's what they both got. It seemed to take effect for Audrey within a few hours (at least, she peed a lot!), but the jury was still out for Thomas.

Audrey's desat spells are classic PDA desats; she'll have saturation levels in the mid 90s, suddenly drop to the 70s, and then pop back up again to the 90s. This is indicative of simply shunting blood thru the PDA. The attending physician added a second oxygen saturation to their monitors so that he could look at levels from two different areas of the body and be able to assess if pressure is getting too high in the lungs (early sign of congestive heart failure, I believe). If needed, they'll move to surgery to snip the PDAs. Pray, pray, pray for all of those PDAs to close!

Despite the PDA and regular desat episodes, I was able to hold Thomas today, skin-to-skin! He's pretty dependent upon his CPAP, but he did well outside of his isolette with me; I'm grateful for that.

It's a funny thing for holding your child to be so stressful at times, but that's been true thus far. The transition from inside the isolette to my arms requires a lot of disconnecting and reconnecting of probes and CPAP, and that invariable leads to beeping monitors and suboptimal vital statistics. If I become tense about it all, that only serves to make the baby tense as well...and that leads to continued suboptimal saturations and/or heart rates. So the first few minutes are basically a lot of me praying for God's peace for both of us and for God to give everything that is needed for heart and respiratory function. So far, so good. They settle in, get cozy, fall asleep and stat well overall for the remainder of the time. But it's definitely a different experience from holding Hannah just after birth...