Pierce Day 57

Hey!  Sorry about the big delay between posts. This week has been a lot of sitting and waiting and very little new information so it has been a bit frustrating. Rather than an update every day that would basically say that we didn't know anything else, I just decided to wait.

Yesterday was Thanksgiving and I do want to say how grateful I am for Pierce, for Amy, and for modern medicine. Not too many years ago, we wouldn't have our beautiful little man with us any longer. We live in a wonderful world,and frustration with still being in the hospital aside, I'm grateful that we are able to be here and get Pierce the care and support he needs.

So today after a week of being fed through the NJ tube, they finally started him on NG feedings again. It's a relatively slow process, they leave the NJ tube in, and put a second tube down the other nostril through which they will slowly reintroduce his NG feedings over the next week. They started that at 2 pm today with 10 ml fed over a two hour period. He tolerated that like a champ but when they went to do his next feed at 5, he still had 7 out of 10 ml left in his stomach. This is fairly common when first restarting feeds until the stomach remembers to push the food through, so they just held off on that feed and checked again at 8, and he is in the middle of his second feed now. The plan is to increase his feed by 10 ml per time per day. Monitoring meanwhile to check for signs of reflux and or distress.

They didn't learn anything from this past week. Instead of it being obvious pretty quickly as we were told, instead they kept him on an oxygen cannula all week and didn't record any of his little episodes, so there was little point to his week of NJ feeding other than a stall tactic so that the surgeon can get back from vacation. We are being told that they don't record self correcting episodes, and it feels like the blank stare Olympics when I ask how exactly it's a "self" correcting episode when he is on oxygen. To me that's a machine corrected episode that we have no clue how extensive it could have been if it were "self" corrected, but I'm just using common sense, not vast medical knowledge. We have a meeting with Dr Fenton and the neonatologist and the nursing staff on Tuesday to hopefully provide some clarification about all of this and some idea as far as what to expect with a plan moving forward. Amy will be the one there, so I'm confident we will get some answers.

That's it for tonight, we will just be watching his tolerance of his feeds and hopefully it all goes well.