19 Days Old

There's nothing like walking into a NICU room and realizing that the four isolets that line one side of the room hold babies that all belong to you. When things are challenging and not going well, the staff will keep the mood light by saying, "Oh wait until they are teenagers and act up."

This last week we experienced lots of "acting up" from the little ones, as well as some good times. On New Year's eve Thomas and Cienna had their PDA's closed via surgery and Gracie had hers the following morning. This is a procedure that is done at the bedside. The NICU room is closed off and turned into a sort of operating room. (Click here to see a video of this type of surgery.) The surgery went smoothly for which we were very grateful. Closing the ductus enables more blood to go to their lungs and intestines and allow the babies to begin to grow and thrive. Post surgery the three had difficulty urinating. I've never prayed so hard for someone to pee. After a day and a half the good news finally came: Everyone had soaked their diapers and two had soaked their beds! We were relieved and proud! Even the doctor who had gone home had called in a couple times during the night to see if they had urinated and she was just as thrilled as we were. 

A couple days leading up to the PDA surgery we had been monitoring William. His white blood cell count was elevated to 50,000 and the secretions from his ventilator were yellow, indicating he was fighting a bug. In addition, the skin on his face began to blister in what seemed to be a reaction to the tape being used to keep the ventilator tubing in place. A blood culture was taken and he was put on antibiotics while we waited for the results. Eventually it was determined that William has staphylococal pneumonia. Thankfully he is responding well to the medication and today he was bright and chipper. In the meantime he remains on hold for the PDA surgery. "How on earth did he get the pneumonia?" is a question that is easy to agonize over since everybody goes above and beyond to be clean when coming in contact with each baby. At the end of the day I've come to the realization that we only get 99.9 of the germs and that the 0.1 percent that may not be cleaned off holds thousands of germs. 

Here are a few pictures from today:

Looking through the window into our NICU room while Cienna is getting her PDA ligation.