After a good day yesterday, E had a lot of events overnight. Even though we seem to be having a good day about every other day, the events have been increasing in frequency. He also is more dependent on breathing support than they’d like him to be at this point. So D and I were invited to attend rounds this morning to talk about next steps.
Since many of his events seem to happen around feedings (a full stomach can make it hard to breathe), the nurse brought up the possibility of going to continuous feedings, instead of “meals” every three hours. They had already stretched out the feeding time from 45 minutes to an hour to allow him to digest his feeds without getting quite so full, but the doctor wasn’t quite ready to jump to continuous yet. For one, it would require an additional special feeding tube, but more importantly, he said the human body is designed to have meals, not continuous feeds so he preferred not to jump to that just yet.
The doctor recommended instead that we increase his caffeine intake. I can’t recall whether I’ve mentioned this before, but yes, you read that right — caffeine. They give caffeine to preemies because it prevents them from going into too deep of a sleep, because their brains are immature and they “forget” to breathe when they sleep too deeply. Since Emmett has gotten bigger (he gained another 28 grams today and is now up to 2 lbs 6 oz), and also because he’s eating more, his initial caffeine dose just might not be cutting it anymore. So he essentially got bumped from a grande to a venti.
The other thing they wanted to look at was his heart. We’ve known he has a murmur, which is really common with preemies and pretty much expected. But the doctor thought we should get a better look at it, so he ordered an echo cardiogram. Thankfully, we got the good news later this afternoon that the murmur is very mild and not likely the culprit of his increased episodes. It should resolve on its own eventually. In some cases the murmur could get worse down the road as his lungs grow, but at least now that we have a baseline, we know what to look for. If in a few weeks he suddenly starts having more episodes they’ll repeat the ECG to check its progress.
The good news is, after increasing his caffeine earlier he had a good rest of the day, so we’re keeping our fingers crossed that’s all we needed. The doctor also started him on a steroid inhaler (Flovent – the same thing I’ve used to treat my asthma) to treat some inflammation in his lungs. They’re hoping a couple weeks on the Flovent will allow us to start weaning him off some of his respiratory support so he can work toward breathing more on his own — an important step in getting him home eventually.
As if that weren’t enough excitement for the day, he also had his first bath! Now that his umbilical stump is gone, it was a prime time to do it. And he was starting to smell a little ripe. 🙂 He wasn’t a big fan of the bath and cried through most of it, but they put him on me for kangaroo care once it was over and we had a really nice session. I held him for almost three hours and his heart rate and oxygen saturation were really good.
After going home and having dinner with D and T, I’m back at the hospital and hoping for an uneventful night.
Keeping up with the Hoffmans 
Oh, his little cries. So sweet. He looks so good, too!