The Pendulum Swing is Killing Us!

We were less than 24 hours from taking Karsie home and then she took a pretty big step back. Kevin was holding her and she started to throw up.  While she is a pretty spitty baby, this spit up was pretty dark yellow, a sign of possible obstruction.  They did another x-ray and it came back a little worse than the other x-rays taken.  

At this point she has been backed off to 50% feeds, an order by Dr. Saenz, and they are going to give her a chance to fix it on her own.  Dr. Saenz is coming in tomorrow to take a good look at her and write out a plan.  We're sure that they are going to exhaust every option before surgery, but to be honest, we're thinking that surgery is on the horizon for Karsie.  

They are going to be putting her back on the TPN and fat tomorrow because it's been a long time since she has gotten her full feeding, so she's not growing.  They are probably going to be doing some extra tests to see what exactly is going on.  

This is very upsetting to us as she was doing so well lately and it is very possible that we are going to have to start all over again.  We hope that she can correct it on her own, but we're not counting on it.  We're so exhausted with all of this and feel like we're being pulled in so many emotional directions that it's starting to take a toll on us.  So again we return to the prayer well and ask for more.

Catching Up!

Sorry we've been out of commission for a few days.  It's been an incredibly busy time for us. We had a fun time with Karsie on Halloween.  But she was one angry cow during picture time in the NICU.  We had to shove her arm into one of her sleeves as her IV was in the way (we made it work).  She is pretty grumpy not being at home, which we kind of enjoy.  However, she was REALLY grumpy Halloween.  Many nurses came by to look at her costume, and even though we didn't get a good picture of her being happy, she did have a long time where she was content.  

Yesterday we celebrated Michelle's birthday by taking a day off and going to Disneyland.  We visited Karsie at 6 a.m. and returned to the NICU at 10 p.m. just in time to see her sleep both times.  Since Michelle gets a free day at Disneyland on her birthday, we took advantage; plus with our friend Dave having the same birthday, it led to a good day of everyone in the park saying "Happy Birthday" every 5 minutes.  It was exhausting, but very fun.  So, we didn't get to update you guys for a while, but we're back now.

Karsie:  She has been doing fantastic!  The plan is still to be out of there sometime Tuesday, but incredibly we're still not sure what the plan is even though we've asked.  There are some details that are a little confusing.  She has not thrown up at all as of 5:30 this morning.  We're not sure about after that.  She has been on 100% of her feeding since midnight last night, so we assume that midnight tonight they will increase her calories to 22 with rice cereal.  That should get us finished by Tuesday at noon; unless they want to observe her for 12 more hours, which would put us at midnight, which would mean they would extend our fun little stay until Wednesday. The other thing Karsie has been doing is eating orally almost all of her feeds.  She is pretty tired from midnight to 6 a.m. (who isn't) so she usually has to be fed through a tube at that point, but every other feeding she has been eating all of it.  Hopefully this continues with her 100% feedings so we can get that tube out soon.  We should have a vision of how she is doing and how she will do later on tonight.  We hope to have some pictures of her coming home....again.