23 November

A little bigger than yesterday:  4 lb. 6 oz., and handling my breathing pretty well (except when I forget), they've been able to keep me at 21 percent oxygen on my nasal flow.

In fact, Dr. Green upped my feeding a little bit since I handled 38 ml well (no major spitup or residuals the past couple days) to 40 ml per feeding.  They also tried to see if I can handle that over 60 minutes instead of 90, and the answer appears to be "no" - but more on that later.

Mom and Dad came by around 11 a.m. to practice feedings again, and found me once again fast asleep.

Today they were meeting the lactation consultant to try breastfeeding me and Rory for the first time (not at the same time for the moment - though Mom says we have to learn how to do that eventually since it would take too much time to do us one after the other every time).


When they arrived, Nurse Sandy told on me (boo!) that I had had a pretty bad bradycardia spell during my 8:30 a.m. feeding and had taken a lot of stimulation to get my stats back up (really the story is that I had overheard Dr. Green saying I might be ready to move to the Special Care nursery soon and didn't want to move so realized I need to throw in a couple spells now and again - but we'll just keep that on the QT).

So since I had had a significant episode earlier that morning, they said I couldn't try breastfeeding, I had to stick with the tube feeding while I watched (my eyes may be closed, but I knew what was going on) Rory try it instead.

They did let me at least come out of the crib; Dad held me for my feeding while Mom was working with Rory.  However when I had another spell of bradycardia and major desat-ing, the nurses put me back in the crib.  They seemed to be pretty freaked out over a minor drop in heartrate as they and Dad were vigorously trying to stimulate me - I kept my cool and just yawned then went back to sleep.

After I got all my stats back to where they were supposed to be (they had to turn up my oxygen a little bit but then were able to put it back afterward).

About an hour later I had yet ANOTHER bradycardia episode.  I did recover, and then Dad just sat with me for a bit while I slept.

Meanwhile, Nurse Sandy talked to the doctors and they decided to slow down my feedings back to 90 minutes again since I have not been handling the faster (60 minute) feedings.  Hopefully I'll handle things better that way, especially with Thanksgiving coming up I want to be able to eat myself a good Thanksgiving dinner!