2 Weeks

Today was awesome.  Not in the over-used way either.  I sat in a chair holding my son for at least 90 minutes, marveling at how small he is, staring at his face and occasionally into his eyes, letting my mind meditate on the moment, and not worried at all about tomorrow.  The only time I let something else captivate my attention is when Trish was getting Scarlett out to hold.  That's right, Scarlett was held by her mother tonight!

I want to share this back-story in hope that other micro-preemie parents may stumble across these pages some day.  The twins are 27 weeks 5 days corrected.  Yesterday, her blood culture came back after 48 hours showing it contains E coli.  The put a needle in her back and took spinal fluid to analyze to see if it contains bacteria. We most likely won't hear on that culture until tomorrow night, but they did not see bacteria present when they examined it under the microscope.  However, due to the levels of white blood cells, sugar, and protein in her fluid, they are going to treat her as if she had meningitis.  It is very possible that the tests don't find anything even if it was there because she has already been on antibiotics.  Last night, I researched "Bacteria in the Blood" and Meningitis (which I highly recommend against for those that are reading this to follow our story), and learned that this can have some very serious consequences.  There are many documented benefits to Kangaroo Care citing babies do better when they have more skin-to-skin contact.  However, their first week the hospital staff was more concerned about getting infections in their umbilical lines and since then Scarlett has been on the High Frequency Oscillator.  They don't like to do KC on the Oscillators.  I have asked around to try and get the specifics, and I think the reasons include:

1. They've never done it before.  Not a good enough reason for me.
2. Babies on Oscillators are generally too sick to "jostle" around.  Wouldn't they benefit the most?
3. The tubing from the Oscillator to the Trach Tube is much shorter and less flexible then the conventional ventilator.  We'll be flexible.  In this case Trish sat in a desk /swivel chair instead of the more comfortable chairs so she could be higher up.
4. The change in pressure to Scarlett's lungs if her tube were to come out could be very harmful.  Valid concern, and unfortunately this has already happened twice.  Lets be very careful.

Maybe I offer a fresh perspective.  Maybe 99/100 nurses will read this and slap their foreheads because of my ignorance.

Once the doctor shared that Scarlett may have/had Meningitis and would be treating her as such, I asked if Mom could Kangaroo today.  I was ready with a rebuttal for every objection I could think of, but the doctor said, "We should be able to do that."  Wow!  So at 9pm, Scarlett was held by her mother for the first time!  She lasted about 45 minutes before she was consistently destatting and letting us know that it was time for her to go back into the Isolette.

Grayson:

Scarlett: