Days 21-22 - February 13-14, 2013

Happy Valentine's Day! Today the girls are 3 weeks old.  The last two days have been fairly eventful for both of the girls and also for Andrea. Yesterday Andrea's mom flew back home to Kansas.  It was great having her here, she was a huge help and we're glad she was able to visit with her newest granddaughters.

Since Andrea is older and bigger than the twins, let's talk about her first.  As discussed in the previous post, she got mastitis (breast infection - do yourself a favor and don't google this. you'll see stuff you don't want to see....).  She's feeling much better now thanks to Keflex (antibiotic) and a little TLC.  Today she had a consultation with a lactation nurse and scored a loaner of the mother-of-all-breast-pumps -- the Medela Symphony.  This thing is like the Rolls Royce of the breast pump world.  Anyways, she is a much happier camper now.

Let's start with Aubrey.  Here's a picture of her that we took today.

Her nurse was changing her diaper as we were watching, and she just opened her eyes and stared at us for about 5 minutes.  This is the most she has ever opened her eyes, so it was really cool to get it on camera.  Here she is with mommy's hand on her head.

I'm not sure how much Aubrey actually saw and processed, but it seemed like she was somewhat interested in us.

Aubrey is doing well overall.  She's still on the regular ventilator, and I would describe her settings as moderate.  She hasn't had any blood in her lung suction in about 5 days.  She is pretty swollen right now due to fluid retention, and is being given diuretics (medications that make you pee) to help with it.  I think if she were adult-sized she would most resemble a sumo wrestler, but I guess most babies that I've ever seen look like mini sumo wrestlers.

Her feedings have been increased to 5 mL of milk every 3 hours, and she is pooping like a champ.  One of her nurses compared the contents of one particular diaper to an elephant turd.

Speaking of turds, let's switch over to Paige.  I'm proud to say that I changed my first poopy diaper ever (that was a good 30-year streak).  Here's me vs Paige pooh.

From the picture one could draw the conclusion that I was somewhat grossed out.  I just recall being highly focused on ridding Paige's general area of anything green.  Here I am putting on the finishing touches.

I probably did a terrible job, but the nurse made me feel really good about my efforts, haha.  Rumor has it that I'll get lots of practice with this sort of thing.

Now for more important and serious things.  Paige had been switched over to the regular ventilator earlier this week, but her overall ventilation started to really go downhill today.  She was switched back to the high frequency oscillating ventilator today around noon, and has been having a rough time on that, too.  To boot, she had another echocardiogram today, and her PDA (murmur) is worse than what is was the last time it was checked on Monday.

The belief is that a combination of her PDA and immature lungs is making it very hard for her to properly ventilate.  Since she has already had two rounds of indomethacin to treat the PDA, the medical team and Andrea and I have decided that doing surgery to close up the PDA is the best step to take to help her lungs work properly.  She is scheduled for surgery tomorrow (Friday) around noon.

If you recall from previous posts, a PDA is not in the heart itself.  It is a shortcut between the aorta and pulmonary arteries.  Therefore, this is not heart surgery.  Based on my discussion with the doctors and reading about it, it seems like a pretty simple procedure as far as surgeries go.  Just make a small incision between the ribs, carefully maneuver around the lungs and other innards to find the PDA, then clamp it shut with something.  Our hope is that this will help her ventilation enough to avoid having to use IV steroids, but it seems like we are moving in the direction that IV steroids will probably happen.  See Day 9 post for a short discussion of IV steroids.

When Andrea read a story to Paige today, Paige opened up her eyes and stared at mommy the whole time the story was being read to her.