July 7th, 2007

I checked with NICU as soon as I woke up and was overjoyed to hear that Megan rested peacefully all night and maintained her body temperature. She took the breast milk well and they will be increasing her dose to 2 cc every 3 hours. They also decreased her ventilator and she was receiving less assistance from the machine and breathing more on her own - great news! That completely lifted my spirits after the rough experience yesterday.

We spoke to her neonatal dr during our morning visit. They did increase her breast milk to 2 cc every 3 hours. They also decreased her ventilator to 25% which means that she is doing 75% of her breathing on her own! All along she has been breathing the same air that we breathe, no oxygen unless needed. He had looked at her 3rd echo and said he was please with the results. Her valve was just about closed and they were just going to give her one more dose of medicine which should take care of it!

We saw that she had an extra diaper underneath her own and found out that she is consistently peeing through her diaper :) She has great working kidneys!

The night before she had a blood test and they said it came back negative, so she was taken off the antibiotics. Yay - one less IV!

The dr also let us know that they would be doing her head scan tonight to check for bleeding in the brain. The results would take approximately 24 hours, so we should be able to hear back tomorrow. Her bilirubin is starting to go down.

She did lose 1.5 oz. The dr did tell us to expect her to lose a bit of weight before she gains. She is losing some fluids that had originally made her appear a little puffy. He said that it typically gets a little worse before it gets better. It's definitly tough to hear that, but we know that the next 10 weeks will be a roller coaster.

I spoke with my OB GYN and they are unsure what caused my early delivery. I do have a bicornuate or heart-shaped uterus. They believe that is what caused it. I may also have a weak cervix that just dialated on its own. My next pregnancy would most likely result in a premature birth as well. However, there are precautions that they would take to prolong labor as long as possible. Oddly enough, I already look forward to our next child!