Adam's corrected age is now 4 weeks. It's 16 weeks since he was born and he weighs 2.3 kg or 5 lb. Our lovely mini-man's eyes are slowly improving after his surgery, but he still needs high flow rates of humidified 40% oxygen-containing air to survive. When I look back to my previous blog entry, I see he is a bit bigger and on slightly lower oxygen than he was 3 weeks ago, but he now seems pretty stuck at this oxygen level and weight. He's using so much energy to breathe that weight gain is hard and we need to break this vicious cycle to allow him to grow stronger and get new lung tissue. Like many babies, especially premature ones, he refluxes, but as well as causing him discomfort, the doctors think he is aspirating some of the refluxed milk into his lungs, worsening their condition. Unfortunately, this reflux isn't considerably improved by medical treatment (including gaviscon) and he has demonstrated this while having a barium meal and being x-rayed as well as by coughing and having milk coming out of his mouth. These coughs also often cause his heart to slow and his oxygen saturation to decrease a lot, so are doubly bad. In addition, the gaviscon thickens milk too much to be able to then add extra calories to my breast milk (which he is still taking through a tube - he can suck well but gets tired too quickly to take a full feed from the breast). The decrease in calories caused by the reflux treatment is therefore stalling Adam's growth, contributing to the vicious cycle rather than breaking it. So what to do? The doctors suggest a surgical procedure called fundoplication, where part of the stomach is brought up around the oesophagus so that when the stomach is full, it reinforces the stomach valve so that it doesn't open and allow milk to reflux up the oesophagus. Surgery would be keyhole, and only take a couple of days to recover from, but I still have loads of questions in terms of the improvement we could expect, long term effects of the surgery etc. The surgeon is coming to see Adam today, so I should be able to get answers, but especially since he started having these coughing and desaturation episodes, I feel something needs to change. I just hope it happens quickly and works. At the moment we are stuck in the hospital, a static fixture amidst a blur of other babies rushing past us towards home. Adam is going to be a sick, little baby for sometime yet, but I want to be able to see the end and I can't yet.
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| Guess how old I am today? |
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| Monkey! |
