Father-son bonding time.



This is the new apparatus. It doesn't go in his mouth, it just looks like it from this angle.

Quinn continues to do well with feeds. He gets ramped up every 12 hours, so he's now up to 7 ml per feed. The upper limit is 17, so he has a ways to go. I'm having a hard time picturing his stomach being that big, but maybe that's the point of slowly increasing it, stretching it out somehow.

The NICU called this morning, and as usual the person I talked to prefaced things by saying nothing dire was going on. But I still get a little fluttered when I see it's the hospital on the caller ID. Anyway, she asked about the Hepatitis B vaccine, since Quinn will be 30 days old(!) this weekend. I declined it, and that was no big deal. Whew. Then she said he will have an image done of his heart sometime midday or early afternoon. The concern now is that his PDA is open. This is a duct that's open before birth and closed after. It was checked when he was a few days old and was closed, but apparently that isn't necessarily a permanent situation. If it's open, that would explain his increasing needs for oxygen and breathing support. His blood pressure has also been a bit low (last I looked at it, it was something like 52/34!) and that could also be explained by this condition. So we'll see how that goes. We'll go in sometime in the early evening, and hopefully by then they will have the results of this imaging.

The good thing about having the worst day of my life so recent and fresh in my memory is that every day since has seemed much better by comparison. It still varies day to day how optimistic I feel about our situation. Some days I'm able to say "This is just a bump in the road. We'll get through it and move on with our lives and everything will be okay." Other days, I'm reminded how fragile Quinn is, and I have to wonder what life would be like knowing that every family picture is incomplete because someone is missing. I'm not sure yet what kind of day today is, but I find myself reliving that day 4 weeks ago when it felt like our world was crashing down around us. I hope the old saying time heals all is true.