Every Breath You Take

Ellie continues to do well with no breathing support. We'll see how she makes it the night. I expect she will do fine through the night and through tomorrow. Last time she was taken off of breathing support she did fine for a few days and then got tired or something. Although we won't hold our breath as we're waiting to see how she does over the next few days. After all the drama of the blood transfusion Ellie gained 20 grams today! That puts her at 3 lbs 8 oz (1600 g). We're proud of her for gaining weight even though she missed all those feedings in the last 24 hours. Now she's getting 32 mL of mom's milk every three hours (as we said before) but the feeding is spread over only 35 minutes now. They've also begun to mix in vitamins with Ellie's food. Apparently these are vitamins that they typically don't give to premature babies until they're a little older than Ellie. But they thought this would be a good time to start Ellie on them after the transfusion. Please pray for Ellie's breathing as well as her eye exam tomorrow morning. Also pray for our care conference tomorrow discussing all aspects of Ellie's stay here at the Stormont-Vail NICU.

Morning Report

The big news today is that Ellie got her nasal cannula removed! So once again she is completely off of breathing support! So far so good: she hasn't had any desats this morning. And once again she got much cuter from yesterday to today. How many days can she keep it up? She also has a new N.G. tube. It is not staying in very well so they'll have to at least adjust it. Nurse Kent pointed out that he had to use adhesive remover on her face since he was removing the nasal cannula. And perhaps the adhesive remover stayed and was preventing the N.G. tube's tape from sticking to her skin. I thought maybe they could have let her be N.G. free until 2:00 when they feed her. But oh well, maybe I just wanted to snap a picture of my little girl with an unobstructed face. When they do feed her they'll be giving her 32 mL of mommy's milk (fortified to 24 calories). So maybe she will be able to make up for lost time and still gain some weight by 8 o'clock. Personally I will be happy if she breaks even or even just loses 10 grams. Considering all the skipped meals and fussiness I think that would be doing pretty darn good. Whatever she weighs tonight we will just be glad that the transfusion is behind us and we will look forward to a good gain tomorrow. Please pray that she will persevere through the hunger and mom and dad will be able to comfort her. Pray that she will eat up her food and recover really well from all of this stress. And pray that she'll go to sleep through the rest of her hunger.

Fatherhood

This morning's early report indicated that it was a quiet night, and our little Ellie wasn't too fussy. She didn't like being on her back last night. And she's become quite accustomed to her pacifier. Ellie had one major episode, but the nurse said that she was laying on her pacifier and it had pushed her cannula out, so he wasn't sure if that would count against her. She had a total of about 10 desats which was better than the 30 she had during the day. We're not sure if Ellen will end up removing her nasal cannula today or not. Ben gave me the gift of getting away for a couple hours last night. My good friend Dana called me at the last minute to got to the Carrie Underwood/Little Big Town concert last night here in Topeka. Thanks so much Dana and Rob! Little Big Town is awesome - four part harmony - oh, so good! Boy it's sure hard to leave Ellie, but it was just what I needed. Plus, I knew Daddy would take great care of her! When I got back it was so fun to hear her report from Ben. He's so wonderful at this father thing. I asked if she was really fussy (since she of course is still realizing that she cannot eat until 3 p.m. today) and he said yes, but she was consolable. Lots of talking, singing (she seems to like this especially) and Ben said they started reading from the Gospel of Mark last night - it was time to talk a bit about Jesus. :) He held her kangaroo style and she liked that. She slept through the entire hour...oh, how neat that we can have these moments of really feeling like we can console our little girl. Daddy was also great at reporting to Mommy's million questions. Ben also told me that he decided he was going to fast today with Ellie. Of course that brought tears to my eyes. He sure loves that girl. What a great father and husband I have ... Thank you Lord for Ben. Prayers for Ellie's little tummy today as we're all looking forward to when she can get replenished with food! Prayers also for Mommy and Daddy to do homework. It turns out that's not going so well. Thanks for praying for Ellie yesterday, she definitely got a princess sticker for making it through what hopefully will be her one and only blood transfusion. Much love, Team Gramkow