Day 2 - January 25, 2013

It's been 6 days since Day 2, so I'll try to remember what happened as best I can.  The previous night, I spent my first night at the hospital.  That was pretty uncomfortable, but you can sleep anywhere if you're tired enough.  I spent the whole day going back and forth from the NICU, where Aubrey and Paige were, to Andrea's room to make sure she was doing alright.

Overall, Aubrey was doing better than Paige. Aubrey's lungs were better developed, and she was quite a bit bigger. Towards late afternoon a couple of the doctors were talking about extubating her (taking out the ventilation tube) and giving her a nasal cannula to see how she would do breathing mostly on her own. If you're wondering what a baby does all day inside one of the NICU isolets (I call them incubators or baby ovens), here's a video of Aubrey.

Pretty exciting, huh?

Paige was generally stable, but was not doing quite as well as Aubrey.  Here's a picture of her from Day 2.

Things were going pretty well, so at about 10:30 PM I left the hospital to go home, get a few things, and take a shower, after which I would go back down to the hospital.  Just before midnight, I got a call from Andrea. She said that one of the NICU doctors had come into her room and woken her up and told her that Aubrey had had a lung bleed.  Being in a somewhat drugged up state from the pain medications, Andrea didn't really understand what the doctor had told her.  I got in the car and quickly returned to the hospital.

When I got back to the NICU, the doctor explained that Aubrey had had a pretty significant lung bleed at 10:45 PM, but that they were able to get the bleeding under control in about 15 minutes. They had called a code blue on her, and the way the doctor described everything made it sound like he thought Aubrey was lucky to still be alive.

Like any other bleed, the way to treat a lung bleed is with pressure.  The only way to put pressure on the lungs is to increase the ventilator pressure, so her ventilator settings were turned way up. The problem with turning up ventilator pressures is that it causes damage to the lungs, so it's kind of a Catch-22.  The doctor also told us that babies who have lung bleeds are also more prone to have bleeding in the brain.  Not good.

I went back to Andrea's room and explained what had happened to Aubrey.  We both went to the NICU, and I gave Aubrey a Priesthood Blessing.  Thus ended what I assume will be many of very challenging NICU days.