Days 18-20 - February 10-12, 2013

Sorry about combining three days in one post again.  The past three days have gone pretty well for the girls.

As I said in the previous post, they both received indomethacin to treat their PDAs (heart murmur described in earlier posts). The echocardiograms showed that Aubrey's PDA is now completely closed.  Even though this was Paige's second treatment with indomethacin, her PDA is still open but is much smaller than before according to her doctor.  That's good news for both.  I've noticed that both of their blood oxygen levels have been a little more stable the past few days, no doubt due to the improvement in PDAs.

Here's a picture of Aubrey with her celebratory "I'm-number-1-cuz-my-PDA-is-gone pose."

My parents have a picture of me doing the same thing with my thumb and index finger right after I was born.  I saw her do it, then waited patiently for 15 minutes hoping she would do it again so I could snap this picture.

Paige was a little camera shy the past few days, so I don't have many of her to share.  Here's one.

In the last post I said that Paige had been put back on the oscillating ventilator because her lungs had collapsed.  Today (Day 20) she was switched back to the conventional ventilator and has been doing well on it!  She is requiring very little additional oxygen, and her pressure settings are about what they were prior to her lungs collapsing.  Hopefully we won't have to deal with that oscillator again.

Both Paige and Aubrey are still being fed more milk through their g-tubes.  Previously they were receiving 1 mL of milk every 3 hours (1 hour feeding, 2 hours break).  Now they are receiving 3 mL of milk every 3 hours (2 hours feeding, 1 hour break).  They are getting milk that Andrea has previously pumped and frozen.  Preemies as young as Aubrey and Paige can't have fresh milk because there is some sort bacteria or virus (i think it was cytomegalovirus) that may be present in fresh milk that can make them sick, so everything they get has to have been frozen to reduce the risk of becoming sick.  Andrea pumps every 3 hours and we store everything, so we had to buy a chest freezer this weekend because we ran out of room in our refrigerator freezer.  I feel like I help run a small-scale dairy sometimes.

The picture above is Andrea looking into Paige's incubator/oven.  In addition to getting a freezer this weekend, Andrea also got mastitis.  I would hyperlink that, but everything I looked at had some crazy pictures.  If you are curious and turn to google, just know that Andrea was not even close to as bad as some of the cases you'll see online.  After starting Keflex yesterday at noon (500 mg PO Q6H x14d = me using pharmacist language) she feels much, much better.

Let's see, what else has happened.  We talked about echo, about the ventilator, about mastitis.  That's about all I can think of.  Here's some pictures.  Like I said before, Paige was camera shy, so these are all of Aubrey.

Mom's hand on booty.

Reverse bird.

Cracking open her eyes.

And since I'm typing on the desktop, here's a few bonus pictures.  This is me waking Andrea up one morning in southern Utah.  We hiked 10 miles down a creek in the middle of summer to get there. We literally had the whole canyon to ourselves, but we also learned why people don't do this in the middle of summer = hot! Probably won't be going somewhere like that for a while.

Big Sur.