Fighting Infections

I (Brandon) got back in town today around 3:00. When I got here we went to Children's to see Rebecca. She was sleeping comfortably but mom just had to get her out and hold her. This is always good for the girls, they seem to take their sleep to another level when they are being held. They had drawn some blood to test for infection. The results showed there may be something going on so they are going to start her on antibiotics again. While we were there they started an IV to begin the antibiotics tonight but she will have to get another PICC put in tomorrow for the long term medicine. She already has a PICC in her left arm but they can't run the antibiotics in the existing PICC because it has the medicine to keep her valve open. They are going to give her a 7 day antibiotics but may increase to 14 day depending if anything else shows up. They really have no other explanation for her O2 sat levels dropping. Also, we notice a change in her color that has been since she aspirated her milk last week. The potential infection may be from that incident. She did pretty good today with her O2 levels. She also had her feeding tube inserted a little deeper just past her stomach into the small bowel. This is to hopefully get her growing faster.

When we walked into see Joanna after dinner there were 3 nurses and a Dr. around her bed. That's never a good sign. The obvious change was that she was back on the original CPAP because they put an IV in her head and it interfered with her other CPAP. They told us this afternoon they had become concerned about a possible infection with her also. Their biggest concern was that her temperature had dropped and she had a large stomach measurement. X-ray showed a lot of air in her stomach so they were going to have to stop her feeds again. Her stomach measured 22.5cm before we got there. Soon after we got there the nurse was doing her assessment and when she went to change her diaper she was busy filling it. The nurse squeezed around on her stomach and helped Joanna get everything out. She measured her stomach after that and it measured 21cm. They think this was part of her problem, needed to poop. They also ordered labs on her blood. It showed she had a low hemoglobin count, so she will get another blood transfusion tonight. Luckily, she is still within time limits to receive from the same unit of blood as before which is good because we know she has no problems with it. We will know tomorrow if they will continue her feedings or if they will have to stop them for a bit. One explanation they gave for needing blood again is that her body is growing faster than it can produce blood for. They weren't concerned that she was losing blood anywhere.

Another day of minor disappointment but we are remaining positive. Hopefully, they will soon be past the volatile preemie stage where everything is a constant struggle just to stay on top of things. It will be nice to have many consecutive days of no problems, never taking them for granted.