First Diaper Change

I was able to do my first diaper change for Lauren today. The nurse had me take her temperature, change her little tiny diaper and then I was able to hold her while she had her 2pm feeding. It's actually a really cool machine that takes a syringe of breast milk and over about 30 minutes, pushes the milk into her feeding tube and into her stomach. It was so nice to be able to hold her and do those "mom things".

Lauren's Update:

Lauren continues to do great. She is done with her photo therapy for jaundice, is increasing her intake of breast milk and is being weaned off intravenous nutrition. She still has a nasal cannula in to help her remember to breath, however, as she had 2 episodes of apnea in the past 24 hours. If she continues to have apnea, they will start her on caffeine (believe it or not) for treatment. Both twins have a brain scan tomorrow to check for brain bleeds, so we will be eagerly awaiting those results.

Madeline's Update:

Although she has been struggling somewhat, Madeline is improving. Her bruising is substantially better, but she is still on photo therapy for her jaundice. She had a blood transfusion yesterday to help with her anemia, which also helped improve her low blood pressure and enabled the doctors to reduce the dose on the medicine to raise her blood pressure. She is tolerating the regular ventilator well, but the neonatologist is still a little concerned about her CO2 stats. Her PDA (see previous post) may be shrinking, but they still hear a murmur and may need to start treatment if it does not improve. Her white blood cell count (ability to fight infection) and platelet count (ability to clot) were both low today, so they are monitoring this closely to try to determine the cause. Her edema improved substantially from yesterday - they gave her a diuretic and she has been peeing the excess fluid away.