Evening Update (9-7)

Karsie took her feed well tonight. She has had a good day with the bottle as she has taken all of her milk without any spit up (except the very little bit this morning that we reported). She is off of the TPN!!! She is getting clear liquids with glucose for a few days just to make sure she handles the switch okay, but so far so good. We may have forgotten to mention that if she handles being off of the TPN for a few days she will most likely have her PIC line taken out. This is the line that is inserted from her foot into one of her veins and goes directly into her heart. We will be happy to get this out for multiple reasons. One being it gets a line out of her body; two being it keeps a possible infection away; and three being we can dress her feet with socks and onesies and such.

"Goodbye Daddy, See You Soon..."

Karsie should be off of her TPN in a couple of hours. Around noon they typically change the feeding, but they may wait a little longer today to make sure she is handling everything okay. She had the tiniest bit of spit up during her feeding today, but they aren't going to change anything it sounds like. That means that unless she spits up more, which she hasn't done on the continuous feed in a very long time, she will be on nothing but breast milk (feeding wise) at the end of the day. We are very excited about that as it will hopefully give her liver a chance to heal itself.

We are noticing that Karsie hits a wall, so to speak, when eating orally. Around 10 mL she kind of gets tired, or full, and doesn't really want more. We haven't talked to a doctor about this, but our theory is that on continuous feeding her stomach only has to hold a certain amount of food at any given time. During the course of an hour she is getting about 16-18 mL in even increments. When she is bottle fed, she is given the same amount of milk all at once, which we think makes her fuller quicker and might be a bit uncomfortable, which could trigger reflux. We're hoping that when they start to consolidate the feeding into bigger chunks that this will start to expand her stomach so that she can handle more milk in a shorter amount of time. Just a theory.

Her breathing has been consistently okay. She does desaturate (go down on her O2 level) when she cries or moves a lot, but hopefully that will go away.

So far Pinky still looks good. They are covering it with a slimy film instead of wet gauze so that it stops sticking to her scab when they pull it off. Other than that, there isn't really any news to report. It still looks good and looks like it is healing the way it needs to. One day at a time...