Meal times will never be this easy again.

Sophie reached a couple of small milestones today, one she didn't have ANY Brady's or Apnoeas! Yay. The second was that she got up to 14ml of milk every two hours for her feeds, doesn't sound like much but it is a lot for such a tiny wee thing.

I havn't explained about feeding so let me try. Sophies suck and swallow reflex has not yet developed, therefore she cannot feed directly from the breast. This has two major flow on effects, the first is that she needs to have a tiny tube inserted into her stomach through her nose and down her throat so that her milk can be administered directly into her stomach. The second is that Deb has to express her milk.

Our wee girl pre naso gastric tube insertion.

Now expressing milk doesn't sound all that onerous but it has been responsible for us getting a taste of the sleepless nights associated with being new parents. Deb having had a caesarian was not in a position to be constantly getting up and down to get the breast pumping equipment so that duty fell to me (I had been sleeping in with Deb all along anyway). So, every 3 hours and every 4 at night the ritual is: going down to the "milk room" getting the pump, removing the gear from the Milton (sterilising stuff) and asembling it, bringing it back to Deb, waiting while she does the deed, 10 to 30 minutes depending, storing the product, disasembling the gear, cleaning the gear and replacing it in milton, returning the pump and if at night, going back to bed.

What a polava.

I was going to get a Fonterra sticker and put it on my back but didn't think that it would go down well with the other Mums :) I kept this up until she was able to move about and now she is doing all this herself losing sleep while I at least get to sleep through the night, that is if I can get the two of them out of my head for long enough to get to sleep.

Back to Sophie.

So the idea was to start her off on 1ml of milk (colostrum at first) every 3 hours and build our way up to 21ml every 2 hours. In this way her drip can slowly be tapered off until she is up to the 21ml, then they can remove it and we will be able to bath her!

Baby steps

The feeding process is quite interesting, first the attach a syringe to the feeding tube and suck all the air out, burping will never be so easy again. They then attach a syringe with the appropriate amount of breast milk in, remove the plunger and the milk syphons into her stomach under gravity. It takes 1 or two minutes. Meal times will never be so easy again. We are learing to do this ourselves but the Nurses still take care of the timings and amounts. So she is slowly being increased in this manner as she can tolerate it and I am pleased to say she is tolerating it well and will be up to 21ml in no time.

We had a timely reminder of just how well she is doing compared to her peers today, she had a new neighbour turn up today. A wee boy of the same gestational age as Sophie, poor little chap had to have the CPAP machine put on and so is pinioned on his back with this great hulking tubes stuffed up his nose forcing air down him. It is a well studied and accepted fact that pre-term girls do better than boys. When we asked our specialist why he just said that Men have always thought they were the stronger sex but they were wrong, that one is for all your ladys out there :)

Now for the real treat of this post. When I arrived today Sophie had been sleeping for quite a while and we wanted to get her up for a kangaroo care session, will explain about those in tommorows post. So we turned her over to change her nappy (and yes she wees and poos like any other baby) and by the time we had finshed with that she was WIDE awake, looking around and genearlly just being a gorgeous little girl, and I took some video, so here you go.

Isn’t she just a pet? My heart just bursts with pride every time I see this.

One other thing of note happened today, she had the dreaded IV line changed from one arm to the other. Strangely enough she tolerated the procedure well, thanks in large part I believe to the pain relief she received. This is another of those “wow that is really interesting” moments, the pain relief consisted of nothing more than sucrose solution, sugar water dripped into her mouth, and it really worked! The trouble started when they came to remove the old one which had been fastened with a splint and sticky (really sticky) tape, she had a fair paddy man, worked herself up into a real state, which we had never seen before, cried her little heart out poor thing, all good exercise for her lungs I suppose and she slept really well after that.

It is one year to the day tommorow (the 22nd) that Sarah was born and died. It is going to be a rough day I think, we plan to spend quite a bit of time down at the cemetery but the weather might put the Kaibosh on that. In any case we will be with her in our hearts, Sophie too, even if she doesn't know it yet. If you want to do something for us and her just take a moment to remember her if you met her, if not just know that she existed and that she was a person and that she was loved, the fact that she exists in your minds and hearts, if even for the few moments while you read this gives me solace....... Thanks.

Perhaps I should have called this post "tears on the keyboard"

Let the roller coaster continue.