Hitting the bottle

Alex must be reading this blog, or at least be able to intuit when mom and dad are getting depressed about his lack of progress, because this week he pulled a cute new trick out of his tiny hat to cheer us up. He ate from a bottle.

I'm sure this sounds like a little thing to parents of full term babies, but to us this step represented a very crucial turning point in his transition from a critical preemie to a healthy, growing baby. In the NICU they call these guys "feeder-growers," a vaguely creepy term meaning the baby is no longer receiving intensive care but is eating and growing to a size where he can be considered for discharge. At Pennsy, that weight is 4.5 pounds and little AO still has a while before he reaches that benchmark. Today he clocks in at 3 pounds 8.5 ounces, a weight I considered unimaginable just a few weeks ago as I was staring at his impossible tiny toes and fingers.

His nurses and doctors had been reluctant to try him on a bottle because he was anemic and having more episodes of apnea and bradys. The stress of trying to suck and swallow and breathe may have been too much for him. They were holding off on another blood transfusion in hopes that his body would begin to produce its own red blood cells. As his anemia got worse, they decided to go ahead and give him some blood, which freshened him up quite instantly (I wonder how much it would cost to get my own tranfusion, it looks to be quite restorative).

Since his O2 sat levels got much better and his As and Bs decreased after the transfusion, they let him try a bottle on tuesday for some of his feed. He slurped it down nicely and showed no signs of stress. Over the next week they will try to transition him from tube feeds to to full bottle feeds, and then it's on to the boobs.

Other developments. They have determined that AO's strange white blood cell fluctuations are not the result of any impending bacterial infection (just last week the frightening word "meningitis" starting entering our conversations) but are instead being caused by a virus he aqcuired somehow in the past few weeks. Since it has not made him sick they are confident he will overcome the virus with no ill effects. They are glad to finally have an explanation for his abnormal labs, and they have decided to transition him off of the nasal canulla he is still wearing. He is now receiving just a .5 liter flow of regular room air. We could be tube free very soon.

All of this has brightened our moods immeasurably, and it has come at precisely the time when our frustrations were starting to overtake us. It is still hard to fathom his weighing 4.5 pounds, or not having tubes in his mouth and nose. Even harder to imagine is the day when we will place him in our car seat and simply walk out of the hopsital with him. But that day seems mercifully closer now.