Our little man is nearly 4 days old and is doing wonderfully for someone born at just under 30 weeks gestation. He’d already completely won our hearts before we’d even seen him, but he made absolutely sure of it yesterday when he opened his eyes for us for the first time, simply amazing!
Kat is doing well, still quite sore but getting better each day and very happy to have mastered the art of expressing milk to help Micah grow big and strong. She was discharged from hospital yesterday (Tue 22nd) so two thirds of our family was home last night and we’re eagerly awaiting the day that we can bring the final third home too.
We don’t have an exact date for when Micah will be able to come home with us yet but it’s at least 5 weeks away since they’ll almost never discharge a baby before 35 weeks gestation, and in addition to that he also needs to be able to reliably do all the following on his own with no assistance:
- Breathe regularly and keep his blood oxygen levels up.
- Keep his body temperature stable.
- Be at least 2kg and growing.
- Feed from breast/bottle perfectly.
As we get closer to 35 weeks it will become clear how he’s doing on each one and therefore how much longer we can expect before we can take him home.
Currently he still needs the CPAP to help him to breathe – he’s having short periods (1-2 hours) off it every couple of days which mostly go OK, but without it he does forget to take breaths every now and again which leads to low blood oxygen levels. They’re giving him a daily dose of caffeine to help him with this!!
He’s lost about 40g of weight since birth which is to be expected, but still not the right direction. He had his first feeds of breast milk via a tube into his stomach yesterday, so hopefully that will start to turn around and he’ll pile on the fat. He still gets his specially mixed up food via an IV as well for now.
Having prepared ourselves for a much less healthy baby, we’ve been very happy with his progress and the amount that we’ve been able to interact with him. We can reach in and touch him at any time and Kat has had two “Kangaroo care” cuddle sessions with him on her chest, she also got to change his nappy yesterday and I helped to feed him. The risk of infection and various other complications is still present and the doctors have warned us that it won’t be unusual for him to have at least a couple of setbacks along the way so we have to keep that in the back of our minds, but for now it’s great just to enjoy him as he is!
Thank you so much to everyone who has sent love, cuddles, presents, prayers and everything else to us over the past few days. We feel very well supported and loved. Please accept our apologies if we don’t get back to you immediately, we do still appreciate your messages even if we don’t respond 🙂
We’re continuing to add photos to our Picasa galleries, so make sure you check regularly, if you login you can add us as a “Favorite” so you’ll get an email each time we add new photos. We’ll try and keep the Facebook/Twitter updates to just the major events lest we overwhelm everyone with too much Micah news.
Finally, we’ll keep posting here every week or so if you just want to check in semi-regularly for the digest version of how Micah is doing.