Moving On- Week 4

There is no doubt that last week was the hardest week of my short time as a mom, but could arguably have been the hardest week of my life. So many set backs, but in the end all the decisions that were made were truely in his best interest and seem to have made his situation better. Since my mid week post, his fluid situation has improved. An x ray on Friday showed additional fluid around his left lung, so they went ahead and put a chest tube in on that side. He has stayed pretty sedated and on his breathing machine the whole week giving his body time to rest and store what few calories he was given. This seems to be working well. He is looking a million times better and has a little meat on his bones. He isn't back to his birth rate yet and preemie diapers are still a little big, but he is moving in the right direction. His heart is doing well. None of these problems are a result of his heart function and are just complications from the surgery itself. He did get his stitches and bandages removed and his scar seems to be healing nicely. We want to come up with a fun story for him to tell people about his scar.

 Our goals over the next few days are to lessen his dependency on the breathing tube and hopefully get it removed. We are lowering his sedation to help with that, but that also means he will be a lot more irritable. We will be working on increasing his feeds and calorie intake to get him to gain some weight. Today we will be re-examining his left chest tube. It hasn't had any out put recently and his X-ray shows fluid, so that means it will probably need to be re-positioned. Lastly, this week will mostly be a balancing act of fluids. He is taking in a lot of fluids through feeds, meds and different things, but we have to make sure those fluids come back out as well so he doesn't turn into a marshmallow again. Hopefully we can solve this fluid/chest tube dilemma once and for all. We had a lot of support and encouragement last week which was well needed. I just keep telling myself that when Brody grows up and becomes a famous sports player (a non-contact sport that is), we are going to have one heck of a story to tell on Sports Center! Here's to the hope of a much better week!