Update: 2/12/11

Overall he's doing really well. His feeding amount is increasing steadily and is more than triple what it was when he was born. His breathing has been a bit labored so yesterday they put him on a high-flow oxygen system to aid his little lungs. It's nothing invasive, basically it's just blowing forced air through his nose via a nasal cannula to help keep his lungs partially inflated so he doesn't have to work so hard. They just did a blood test and his levels are improved, so it looks like it's working. If everything goes well he should only need it a couple days.

He also hit a bump in the road with his feeding yesterday, basically he wasn't digesting enough of it. The doc thinks it may have been because of the amount of air being blown in his air pipe, a little of which may have gotten in his stomach, but also he hadn't had a big stool at that point so that may have clogged stuff up (imagine that, a child of ours having poo issues). They didn't feed him new food for the next two feedings to allow his body to adjust to the oxygen and catch up with the digestion. We were a little concerned that this was going to turn into something more serious.

However, just after we talked about his poo issues, I (Ryan) changed his diaper and found that he passed the huge plug of meconium (black tar-ish infant poo) that we were hoping was in there. Yes! The nurse thought that he will probably have a much easier time digesting now that he had the big stool. Sure enough, Adrienne called at 3 am this morning while we were up pumping and he had digested all but 4 cc's of his food and was allowed to resume feeding, albeit on a little less aggressive schedule.

The doc told us with preemies with respiratory distress you usually see two days of decline, two days of the same, and two days of improvement before things are back on track. Right now I think we're entering the 'two days of the same' period.

On a side note: He seems to really respond to Adrienne's touch and voice. He was in a crying fit a couple times and Adrienne took him out and held him, in minutes he had calmed himself and began rooting for her breast. Thank God for mothers.

More to come later...

-Ryan