Changing Pinky (UPDATE ADDED)

Other than the awesome dressing change, watch it again and pay attention to the pacifier battle.

Update:  Karsie has had a bit of good news lately.  We're still concerned with her oral eating, but lately she has been gaining weight.  

On Saturday we went in and we were told that they increased her calories to 24 an hour by supplementing formula.  However, she threw up 5-6 times that day, which is well above her average, so they backed off the calories.  However, they increased her breast milk to 23 mL an hour (keep in mind that the mL and calories are different, but their numbers are very similar). We were a bit bummed on Saturday until we started to see a string of weight gains that made us feel better about the throwing up.  She was up to 3.17 kilos on Friday night (really Saturday morning) and she jumped to 3.21 kilos on Saturday.  Tomorrow we'll find out if she's still on that trend.  

To add to that, we had a good breast feeding the past few times.  Two of those times she didn't get more than 5 mL, but one we're not sure what happened.  In order to find out how much she is getting, they weigh her before she eats, and then weigh her after she eats.  They can calculate the mL based off of the weight gain.  Last night she breast fed for about 10 min. and then promptly threw up a bit.  But we tried to keep everything on the towels that we weighed her with and then weighed her, and it said she drank 44 mL.  We actually were not surprised by this as Michelle had pumped a bit before usual (which makes her flow faster).  In any case, she took a lot of milk and did very well on the breast.

We have a meeting with Dr. Saenz and the plastic surgeon on Thursday to assess Karsie's situation.  Their next step is to put tissue expanders in Karsie to stretch out her abdomen for it to accept the organs.  If this is necessary, then we understand.  However, we've been doing some research lately, and we're very interested in something called a compression method (or something similar).  This is where after a few months they wrap an Ace bandage around Pinky and compress the organs inside.  Every situation is different, but we really want to find out about this.  We're pretty sure that our surgeon has not done this (it's not really surgery) and so it will be interesting to see how he takes it when we bring it up.  

Finally, Karsie should be off nasal cannula tomorrow.  Pray that her body does well without it. It's time to see her face!