Silas Update II 26 Days Old

Little guy has been steadily gaining weight throughout the week, proudly boasting a weight of 2 lbs 3 oz (990 gs). Now that his infection is gone and his body can focus on forward progress and growth, he’s really crushing it out there. He’s also earned a solid reputation for being a super pooper and super burper (daddy couldn’t be more proud), having 2x strong regular poops a day at the same times each day (normally preemies need assistance getting this moving), and (newly) strong lungs that are able to projectile burp and barf, spewing milk all the way up to the ceiling of his isolette. Nice work, big boy! Also big this week was getting to hear his little baby cries and OH MAN MY HEART!! This guy is not a fan of his CPAP nose prongs and he wants to tell everyone about it. The past few weeks I have wanted so bad just to hear my baby cry and it was just the best (video below).

We got a solid amount of good news today…
His heart: He had another echocardiogram done this morning to see if the medication he’s been on since Monday has been effective (and to see if we can delay surgery a bit longer) and it seems his PDA has decreased in size from “advanced” to “moderate”. Hey, we’ll take it! That medication protocol was up today, so the doc is going to extend the ibuprofen through Monday and we’ll re-scan then. The doc has warned that surgery is likely inevitable, but ideally we’d like to wait to operate until he weighs a little more and could better support his own recovery. Goal is to get him up to 1500-1800 gs before we have to think about surgery.
His feedings: His baseline nutrition has been via TPN, an artificial nutrition given via a PICC IV line in his arm, and then they’ve been supplementing with breastmilk to prime his intestine and get it working well. He’s been doing great with his feedings, advancing a bit more each day, having gone from 6mls on Monday up to 17 mls today (Yowza). The good news is that since he’s tolerating his feedings and gaining weight, the doctors are discontinuing TPN and putting him on 100% of my milk moving forward. This is best for him as it will help him grow the quickest, and TPN is also harder on his liver, which we’re trying to watch anyway. So, he’s getting bigger and stronger and hopefully we’re about to see him continue on his slow and steady improvement to health. We’ve been warned that some babies respond negatively to the lack of TPN in the first day or two after it’s discontinued, so we’ll work on being patient over the weekend as we look to next week for his body to regulate.

Moving forward: Monday will be another big day of a full panel of test results, another echo and another brain scan. In the meantime, we’ll just keep chugging on the snuggling.

Oh, and if you know a NICU nurse, please call them or text them and tell them we said thank you for everything they do every day to keep these tiny humans rocking. These nurses are literal angels on Earth.