Michael was moved Friday night to the Graduate NICU, which is where the highly improved babies go. This is partly because several new babies (like 20 something weeks) came into the unit within a few hours of each other. The other reason is that he has improved even more.
He has been breathing so well that they've taken him off of the oxygen saturation monitor. His breath rates have been staying down at normal levels that are allowing him to get more rest. He has been constantly sleeping all day whenever he's not being fed. This is great because he was not able to sleep very much on Wednesday and Thursday with all of the poking, prodding and very labored breathing. He's doing so much better now. They even took him off of the antibiotics today.
The 2 issues that are keeping him in the hospital are jaundice and eating. His bilirubin count was above 16 this morning. A 13 would have been plenty to get him under the lights. Whenever he's not being changed or fed, he's under 2 very powerful lights to break down the junk in his blood.
As far as feeding is concerned, we're having mixed results. He ate some yesterday but ate almost nothing today at 9:00 and only 2cc at 2:15. They had to finish those feedings with a feeding tube. Tonight's feeding a 5:00 was better. Ne nursed extremely well for 5 minutes straight and then drank from a bottle another 15cc of Bobbi's milk. It's a giant step in the right direction!
Thanks for the prayers, and feel free to leave comments here on the blog. I'll keep adding pics here and start adding some videos here.
