Day 14, Saturday, November 27

Saturday started out really good. Jamie planned on staying home with Hudson all day, which meant I could spend all day up at the hospital. It also meant I got to drive myself for the first time. Things felt almost normal. I spent the entire morning with Tate, then ran and got myself some lunch and even went to JoAnn Fabrics to look for fabric for a quilt I want to make for Tate. I went back and spent the afternoon with Tate and then ran to the grocery store on my way home to pick up a few things. Then Jamie, Hudson and I all went out to dinner. I even got dressed in a pair of jeans and put on some makeup. Almost normal. Except the whole time at dinner I felt guilty for being out enjoying myself and not at the hospital with Tate. But it was still a good day.


Tate’s bilirubin was back up to 9 this morning. The nurse warned me that he might go back under the lights but so far they haven’t done so. I was able to kangaroo him for 45 minutes at his 9 am feeding. We have been a little frustrated with the nurses because it seems like each one has their own timeline as to how long we can hold him. We were told a week ago that we could hold him for 1 hour, 2 times a day, once a shift. But some of the nurses take him away after just 30 minutes, some allow 45 or an hour, and a few have even let us go a little over an hour. Seems like it should just be written in the chart that we get an hour and we always get an hour. His vitals all seem to be fine so I don’t think they are making us put him back in the isolette because of that. They just all have different timelines they feel comfortable with, I guess.

Tate is now eating his max of 25 ml a feeding. This is his max based on his weight so once he gains more weight they’ll increase it more accordingly. Because he is at his max they don’t think he’ll need the TPN anymore so this evening they removed the IV from his head. Yeah! Looks more like a little baby without all that tape stuck on his head. The nurse ended up giving him another bath tonight (usually they give him one every 2-3 days) but he had lots of sticky stuff stuck in his hair from the tape so she wanted to wash it out. He screamed until she got to his head and then relaxed. She had to tape his right hand back up as soon as she put him back down cause he immediately started grabbing at his feeding tube.

The first big news of the day is that they started adding calories to his milk at his noon feeding. It is called human milk fortifier and has to be added specifically to breastmilk. It has added protein in it because that is the one thing that preterm breastmilk lacks. They started him with 22 calories, which means it adds 2 calories to each serving. Breastmilk has an average of 20 calories in it, so 22 calorie just adds 2 extra to it.  They will be increasing it gradually to add more calories.  This is all supposed to help him gain more weight, more quickly. However, I was disappointed when he only gained 1 gram today. But he had a pretty rough evening, so that could explain the low weight gain. Hopefully tomorrow is better, all the way around.

So like I said, I had a great day and we went out to dinner and I was feeling pretty good about everything. We dropped Hudson off at my parents to spend the night and go to church with them in the morning so that we could stay up late at the hospital and then come back up in the morning. When we got back to see Tate the nurse told us that he had had 3 episodes of bradycardia since she had gotten on at 7 pm. Bradycardia is when their heart rate drops really low. For Tate, his heartrate should be between 80-200, but typically his stays over 140. It’s considered bradycardia if it drops below the 80, which his had done 3 times so far and he did a few more times while we were there. I had planned on just holding him at 9 and then going on home but I couldn’t leave. I’m not sure who it was harder on, honestly, Tate physically or me emotionally. Tate just slept through them all so I’m guessing it might have been harder on me. I am one of those worst case scenario kind of people so as soon as she told us this I have all these awful things running through my mind – his heart is failing, he needs a heart transplant, etc. Jamie had to calm me down which took quite awhile. But I did eventually calm down and we stayed till about 1:30 am. He had another episode or two of the bradycardia while we were there and honestly, the nurse seemed just as worried about it as I was so she wasn’t helping me out. Jamie was the one who told me that if it was something serious, they will tell us and until they do, we can’t do anything about it but pray. I’ve been doing a lot of praying the last few weeks but there was even more praying that night. When we left at 1:30 his vitals were all doing okay and he hadn’t had a brady in awhile. He had also spit up a few times which he hadn’t done at all yet so I assumed it was because of the calories they added to his milk and because he was having a harder time digesting those. It was really hard to leave not knowing exactly what was going on with him and feeling like we had just taken several steps backward. I didn’t think I’d sleep at all that night, but I am so exhausted it didn’t take me long to fall asleep. When I was up at 4 am to pump I called to check on him and she said he’d had one more brady and had just spit up again and she was cleaning him up from that, but otherwise he was doing good.

“Cast your cares on the Lord and he will sustain you. He will never let the righteous fall.” Psalm 55:22