Week 2

In which we learn about lungs…

First week felt like Miracle Baby.

This week, things have come down to earth.

Everything is still going well, but it’s clear at this pointthat she’s 25 weeks old and doesn’t have fully developed lungs. This week has been lots of hard news in quick succession: Surprise! Today she’s being treated for pneumonia. Surprise! This morning a part of her lung collapsed. Surprise! Today she needed a ton of oxygen and is *also* not expelling CO2. Go figure.

Any of these things would be alarming on their own in a grown-up. Turns out they’re pretty normal for ELBW babies with RDS (when we asked the doctor what those terms meant, we learned that it means “extremely low birth weight” with “respiratory distress syndrome”, which led to a full day of panic as we looked up all the associated disorders under these terms)

The good news? She’s putting on weight (20 ml of breast milk per day) and yesterday got back to her original birth weight (1 lb 11 oz). She’s successfully had three cranial ultrasounds with no detectable bleeding. Her heart rate has been steady throughout at 150 beats per minute. Also, we started watching Good Omens this week and then decided to read it to her. While there are too many variables to *really* tell if it makes a difference, we think she likes it.