8/21/06: Day 38 (Mon.) Adventures in B-Feeding

Today I had the opportunity to meet the wound care specialist who has been overseeing Evan's bi-carb burn on his right foot. She hadn't seen his foot in about a week and was very happy to see how well it is healing. She thinks he'll only need about one more week of the treatment (and she lessened it to just once a day). It's nice to know the next time he gets a bath, he can immerse his foot in completely in the water.

The little guy still loves to tug on his nasal cannula and gavage tube. The nurses had to replace both since they were coming too loose. He was able to completely pull the cannula out down to his mouth. He is super-sneaky...he'll make it look like he is just putting his hands up to his face, but then he'll dig his fingers into the top of the tape and pull down.He definitely was not a happy camper when they taped it all much tighter to his face. We'll see how long this one lasts. They did wean him down to .30 on the oxygen flowmeter and he does great when he's mellow; but when he gets agitated (like during diaper changes and such), he desaturates too much (sometimes he'll drop into the 70's which is not good). So they usually bump him back up to .4 or .5 when they fidget with him and then turn it back down when he sleeps. They want his O2 saturation to be between 88 - 100.

For those of you who don't want to read about my adventures in breastfeeding, you can skip the rest of this post! ;-) The main goal for this week is to see how well Evan will take to breastfeeding before I go back to work on Friday. After Friday, they will try to bottle-feed him my breast milk instead of feeding him through the gavage. They hope by testing him on b-feeding, that I will be able to go back a forth between that and the bottle once he comes home.

Over the weekend, which was the first experiment with b-feeding, he didn't do much, so we still had to gavage the whole feed, but he was getting more interested every time we did it. Today, I am happy to report, he latched on for almost 8 minutes during his 6pm feed. Since he was actively latched on for that amount of time, the nurse reduced his gavage amount to about 20ml. The longer he is latched on, the more they reduce the gavage feeding. The lactation consultant (Gloria) was very pleased with how he did since he is still about a month premature.

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UMC Charges: $2,800.00
Running Total: $302,921.44
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