Many of you have asked about Oliver so I am doing a quick update on what is happening. First, I cannot believe it is already 7 weeks on Wednesday. Crazy.
As I mentioned in earlier posts, the NICU is a roller coaster. Definitely not a fun one, very much worth it but it can wear you down for sure.
For those of you that are new here on the blog, Oliver was born at 26weeks 6 days on October 15. He weighed 1lb 10oz. He had to be delivered due to me having severe pre-eclampsia. You can read my earlier updates here.
I mentioned in the last update at one month that he had pneumonia. That was rough, he ended up back on the jet pack oxygen due to that. He luckily did not have to be on it long though. Once they completed the antibiotics for that, they started him on steroids to help his lungs grow better.
He did a full round of steroids and the extubated him again last Wednesday, I really thought that he was going to make it again on the c-pap oxygen but unfortunately he was just having to work way too hard on that oxygen. This was him on the cpap, probably one of my favorite pictures of him as you can see his cute little face 🙂
He was however reintubated again on Saturday. 🙁
Since being reintubated his oxygen percentage has been pretty high and they haven’t been able to wean him down much so they actually are giving him a little more steroids to see if that will help. I really feel that the pneumonia set him back a lot.
The plan at this point is to get him to grow a bit more, gain a little weight and build more lung tissue. And I am hoping that this works so that in the next week or so we can extubate and he will be strong enough to be off it.
As he is getting older, and stronger, he is much more agitated with the intubation (obviously!) and we cannot start with feeding (nippling) until that is out too. Which it is just about time for. We got a pulmonary consult yesterday and the Dr feels that it is pretty much classic chronic lung disease due to prematurity. Like I mentioned above, his recommendation was pretty much let him grow. You can see here, this little boy is STRONG 😉
Otherwise, everything else with him is working perfectly. His eyes are mature, he is gaining weight (although we have to fight the fluid retention too!), he is definitely a lot stronger too!
He now weighs 3lbs 10oz — a full TWO pounds more than his birth weight (and more than double it too!) He is also now 15 inches long (grew 2 inches from birth).
Here is a pic of him during our “kangaroo care” earlier today, I will update again soon!
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