Week 4

Well folks, I'm afraid it will be a short update this week. Brenna saw Eliza on Monday, and I saw her on Tuesday and Wednesday. After that we were both sick with the sniffles and coughs and other various minor ailments. Not enough to truly consider ourselves sick, but enough that the hospital wanted nothing to do with us visiting the NICU. So, we've been anxiously trying to get ourselves better and calling down to the hospital for updates. A pretty big downer for us, but definitely good for Eliza in the long run. The last thing she needs is an overzealous parent to pass a bug to her. The doctor was emphatic that for a baby born at 28 weeks she is doing phenomenally and that we should stay well away until we are a day or two past completely better. So, we're biding our time and thinking of Eliza often.

The news on her end, once again, is all good. Early last week the NICU had another influx of premies, so they had to do some shuffling of babies in the various rooms to even out the workload on the nurses. Consequently, on Wednesday Eliza was moved to a new room. Goodbye, Sophia and Preston. We're sad to not get to spend time with their wonderful parents anymore, but Eliza's new room is actually quite a bit larger and very quiet, so we feel good about her new digs! Brenna hasn't been to that room yet, but she's looking forward to going down tomorrow (assuming we don't get too much snow here in Denver--they're talking about 18" overnight--yikes!). I'm still a few days away from being able to go down for another visit.

The updates we've received in the latter half of the week are these:

• Eliza is now up to 3 lb 8 oz. She's flying along! At 4 lb they will take her out of her isolette as they expect she'll be able to maintain her own body temperature at that point. I'm hoping for another week to 10 days there.
  
• She will be moved to "low flow" oxygen tomorrow, which basically means they will no longer be blowing any air in to help her keep her lungs open--she'll have to do that on her own. She will be receiving slightly more oxygen than room oxygen, but she is pretty low on that scale as well.
• She will start bottle feeding probably next week, or maybe the week after. Before coming home she needs to go 24 hours without being fed through the gavage. So, we have a while to go there.
• She's still having an occasional brady (drop of the heart rate). They consider them serious when they get down into the 50s. Eliza has been having about one of those a night, but she corrects them on her own without external stimulation, so that is good. She has to go five days without a brady before she can come home.

So, once she's over 4 lbs and still gaining weight, maintaining her own body temperature, being completely mouth fed and having gone five consecutive days without a brady she'll be able to come home. She is certainly headed in the right direction. I won't try to prognosticate a date for her to come home, but I'm very hopeful it will be before her due date. We look forward to that day with great anticipation!

Sorry, no pics this week as we didn't take the camera with us on any of our trips as we usually wait until the end of the week to get our photos. Just look at last week's pics and imagine her about 1/3 lb bigger!