Weekend wrap up

Both Brandon and Katelyn are doing well today.

Katelyn continues to have a lot of secretions. She is doing well clinically and doesn’t show many signs of problems but they have restarted her antibiotics just in case. Amy had a long talk with the doctor about what lies ahead. The big challenge of the next month will be getting both baby’s lungs strong. It will just take time and they will try a lot of different approaches. Katelyn now weighs 2 lbs 9 oz.

Brandon was doing really well on the new ventilator. However, last night he had a bad incident. His blood pressure dropped. His oxygen needs shot up to 100% and they even needed to “bag” him. (They had to hand squeeze the air into his lungs because the ventilator didn’t cut it.) He returned to normal pretty quickly and did well the rest of the night but this all sounded very scary to us. We went up this morning to be there when the doctors did their rounds. When we walked in his oxygen needs were down to 25. He has never been this good. As we talked to the doctors they could take guesses at what happened in the night, but of course they didn’t know for sure. They seemed to believe that everything was good before and everything was good after so they thought it was an isolated incident. They assume it was something like getting mucus stuck in his airway. He did seem to be doing really well. They also had given him albuterol to help clear up his airways and it seemed to be really effective. They are going to watch him close but he actually seems to be doing great now. Brandon weighs 1 lb 13 oz. today.

An interesting note about the sensitivity of the monitors: Amy was taking Brandon’s temperature by placing a thermometer in his armpit. Of course he doesn’t like this much and started wiggling so she had to hold his arm still. Just the pressure of Amy holding his arm close to his body set off alarms because his lung wasn’t expanding enough.
Both Brandon and Katelyn have needed a lot of blood over this first month. They even began to get transfusions before their were born. Because they also needed a lot of tests done, a lot of blood was taken from them. They don’t have a lot of blood to start with so just taking blood for tests often meant that it needed to be replaced. Up until recently Brandon had to be typed every three days in order to make sure that his blood type matched perfectly with the donor blood. They have stopped this now but it still seems ridiculous to take a good amount of blood to determine his blood type every three days. The intresting part is that, until recently, it kept changing everyday. Not the main blood type, but the antibodies would change