Emily had a big day yesterday. Emily hadn’t had a bowel movement since she was born. She has been tolerating her feeds well (She’s on day six of a fifteen day feeding schedule to get her digestive system used to food.), and her abdomen has been distended. Yesterday afternoon the nurses gave her a suppository as a ‘tactial maneuver’. Usually they don’t stay in the babies long enough to work because the babies don’t like it when they get inserted so they bear down really hard to get it out. (So it ends up working in the end, just not the way it usually does.) The bottom line is that Emily finally had her first BM in three weeks. Last night before we left Jennifer went to change Emily’s diaper, which was full again. While Jennifer was changing, more poo came out. The nurse took over and put another diaper under her (Emily, not Jennifer), after the first one was filled up. She wiped Emily and even more came out! In total, Emily used up five diapers at once. When the nurse weighed her stool, she found that Emily had an 18 gram BM and after measuring her abdomen found that she had lost 1.5 cm from her overall circumferance. To give you an idea, this would be like you or me going to the bathroom and losing two pants sizes!
Afterwards, her eyes were wide open so that we finally saw her whites for teh first time. We were also able to determine that Emily has brown eyes. When we left, she was breathing 33% oxygen mixture and they had weaned her ventilator pressure settings down a little. We just talked to the nurse at the hospital (we are heading to Philadelphia soon), and were told that she had a good night; her blood gases have been ‘excellent’ and they plan to reduce the ventilator pressure some more. Yesterday’s chest x-ray was also good and showed that one section of hyper-inflated lung is starting to shrink back to normal size. The nurses have set her up with a tiny pacifier which would be a choking hazard for a full-term infant, which they taped to the end of a rolled-up baby hat to use as a handle. Emily has started sucking on her pacifier, but she also likes to bite it, which shoves it out of her mouth. Yesterday she worked out that by putting her hand behing the pacifier she could give it a good shove and put it back in her mouth. We had a scary moment before we left last night when Emily decided to reposition herself. She was lying on her belly with her facing to her left when she decided to lift her head and rotate it so that she was facing down. This is very bad if you’re hooked up to a ventilator and is generally not recommended. Fortunatley a nurse heard us and repositioned her, this time with a bean bag on her head so that she couldn’t move her head with those strong little neck and arm muscles of hers.
Tony