July 12th, 2007

Another beautiful day in Erie, yet I'm still stuck in bed :( I was hoping to dye the grays out of my hair (yes, 26 and I have many gray hairs). However, I read on the Internet that I still have crazy hormones that could cause the dye to turn my hair orange or something crazy. Instead, I may just opt for a hair cut.

I had a great check in this morning! I spoke with Danielle, who has been Megan's nurse a couple times. She said that Megan had a good night. She just rested and her numbers were great. They kept her ventilator at 30 which is very good. The nurse told us that the last couple days they would turn it up while she slept. The ventilator basically assists her with breathing by giving her a set number of breaths per hour. The past couple of days, Megan has been letting the ventilator do most of the work while she slept and then she would do the work on her own when awake. That was actually a good thing because she needed some rest after all the testing and such she had last week. I read that typically a preemie's lungs are not quite ready to breathe without assistance until they are about 1000 grams.

Speaking of grams - Megan gained 20 grams today! YAY! That is right within the 15-30 range that she should be gaining. So she is now about 850 grams I believe. I'll check her chart when we go in.

The nurse said that they have all been impressed with how well that she is doing and that we should be very proud of her - which we are so proud of her! That's our girl!! Bob and I are going to go in this morning and hope to meet her other neonatalogist, Dr. Voora. Tonight, we are attending the preemie seminar at the hospital that will cover how to feel close to our baby, coping with the stress of having an infant in ICU, etc.

We had a great visit with Megan! She was once again just hanging out and sleeping. It was so cute because she had her left arm stretched above her head and her right hand curled around her diaper. Her color looks great and her face is filling out a bit. It's so nice to see her without the face mask on from the lamp. I can see her perfect nose, perfect ears, eyes and mouth. She opened her eyes a bit to look at Bob and I. I'm sure she knew she was looking at her Mommy and Daddy!

She is being increased to 10 cc every 3 hours of breast milk and she is taking it very well. Because she is doing so well with the breast milk, they are decreasing the amount of one of her IVs.

The doctor gave her caffeine today. It's a preventative treatment to prevent apneas and help with her breathing. They said that that once she is further along, they will wean her off the medication.

We went to the preemie seminar. She went over some information that was on the March of Dimes website. We also talked about pumping, storing breast milk, development of preemies, services available for preemies, choosing a pediatrician, some guidelines for when bringing her home, certain precautions we need to take when she comes home, etc. It was also very helpful just to talk about how things are going so far.

Some of the upcoming topics for the group are on breastfeeding and development of a preemie. I am looking forward to both. She also let us know about some of the different people that we will meet with over the next few months. There is so much support available for parents of preemies!!

That is pretty much it for today. I did a lot today, so I'm going to try to just relax tonight.