April 23, 2010

I can’t wait until we can go a week without being thrown a curveball. Benjamin had his first eye exam yesterday and they found a scratch on his cornea. We were thinking he probably scratched it himself; however, one of the surgical fellows believes it may have happened at some point in the operating room weeks ago. The neonatologist I spoke with today isn’t sure if he will have permanent damage because of it. He’ll have another eye exam next week and hopefully it will look better!

The eye exam was originally done to see if he has retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) which is a disorder of the blood vessels in the retina. His eyes are still too immature to determine if he suffers from this, but because his oxygen level fluctuates so much, he’s vulnerable to getting it. We should know more after next week’s exam.

He seems to be tolerating the feeds fairly well! He’s getting so little right now that it won’t help him gain weight, but it’s lining his belly and getting the top part of his intestines to function properly again. I like how they’re managing the feeds by starting slowly. I’m so paranoid about him getting a repeat of necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC). It’s getting to a point where every time they mention something, like the amount of output from the stoma or the color of his stool, I panic and immediately ask the doctor or nurse at his bedside if they think he has NEC again. I finally told them today to get used to my paranoia because I’m going to be acting like this for a very long time!

In the past few days he’s packed on the ounces. He’s now 2 pounds 7 ounces! Still hasn’t made much of an impact on his oxygen saturation leveling off, but hopefully over the next few weeks his desats won’t be as extreme and they’ll become less frequent.

As a side note, Ryan and I had a conference call yesterday with one of the surgeons that performed my laser ablation procedure in Providence to discuss the findings from the examination of my placenta. It was even worse than we originally thought. Unbeknownst at the time, I also had a condition called velamentous insertion where both umbilical cords were not directly rooted to the placenta, just the membranes. The vessels could have ruptured at any time, and I would have lost both of my babies in utero. Benjamin and I are extremely lucky.