Day 22- Birthday Girl

Technically 21 days should have been her birthday but I've clearly got the Blog mixed up somewhere as she was born 3 weeks ago today.  Happy Birthday Olivia Grace and hopefully you'll be home before you reach your six week birthday....Lisa and I will be sleep deprived nervous wrecks and you'll be sick of reading about dirty nappies and other horrible things!

On to the days events...we left the hospital last night slightly concerned about the levels of aspirate that the nurses were extracting from Olivia's stomach, the high levels continued throughout the night steadily increasing from around 14mls per 3 hours to a peak of 36mls in the early hours.  Her feeds continued and whilst this was happening she managed to produce 4 dirty nappies! Normally if it's coming out of one end it wont appear at the other but she was clearly celebrating as it was her birthday. :-) Other good news is that she has put on a whole pound since birth, she is now a super feather weight at a mighty 6lbs 6oz.  Slightly less good news is that Olivia is the longest serving patient/inmate on her ward :-(

The surgeons kept her on 15mls of milk due to the high aspirates and were happy with everything else.  Lisa had a long chat with the nurses about wanting if at all possible to avoid having to go Bath hospital for transitional care and that is still the plan but Olivia is not suckling well enough on the breast yet and needs more training.  She is too keen on her dummy that she has to have to soothe her hunger pains but might be associating the dummy with relief and not food so when she is latched on to the breast she suckles for a few seconds and then falls asleep because she is relaxed again.  Oh well, more practice required.

I'm slightly worried that we are becoming to blase about minor ailments and procedures as we have been exposed to such extremes with Olivia and the other babies.  Most parents outside of a NICU would struggle to watch a doctor trying to find a suitable vein to insert a drip/cannula/line on a tiny baby with it screaming the place down.  We watched a doctor trying to insert a new line in one poor little baby a couple of days ago and after a reasonable amount of time abandoned hands and feet and settled on its head! The poor thing had the lines inserted and then a cup taped around it to stop them from getting knocked/pulled out...we didn't bat an eyelid.

Keep your positive thoughts coming and Olivia might make it up to 20mls tomorrow!

Thanks to Jonny and Rinny for a lovely spag bol on the way home, I've forgotten what it's like to make a meal from scratch!

Thank you and good night.

J x