Week 4

Taking out the tube!

It’s been radio silence on the Floor 3 NICU for the past week.

The reason for this is that we’ve been holding our baby essentially non-stop for a week. Sound amazing? It’s amazing.

Maggie started a round of steroids last week and so far they appear to be doing exactly what they were supposed to do: namely, giving her lungs a chance to rest and heal so she can come of the ventilator. So far she’s been off the vent for six days. Her O2 requirement dropped from 60 to 30 percent overnight and has stayed stable. Steroids ended two days ago and she is doing well.

We didn’t realize that when she came off the ventilator, she ALSO got to come out of the box! We’ve been doing a thing called “skin to skin” where you take off your shirt and let you kid fall asleep on your chest for hours at a time.

In case you’re wondering, this is EXACTLY as awesome as it sounds.

We’ve been holding her for the past five days, singing and reading out loud, lying prone while a beautiful 29 week old sleeps in our arms. It’s been an incredible week! The NICU team is over the moon that she’s made so much progress off the vent, and we are so grateful to them for working non-stop to get us to this point and getting her to a place where her lungs can heal.

Nothing is set in stone. There will be ups and downs. But fuck it — TODAY she is doing incredibly well. TODAY she is healthy. TODAY she is a smiling 29 week old baby girl for whom things are definitely looking up.