25 Weeks

Charlotte Amalie turns 25 weeks tomorrow. Woohoo!

Today she weighed in at 490 grams (1.08 pounds). She's only lost water weight, and they expect her to be back to her birth weight 2 weeks after delivery.

We met with her doctor today and went over the "plan" for the next week. We'll continue to have weekly meetings with her doctor and nurse until things start to level out more and then we'll re-evaluate how often to meet. It was nice to have an hour to just ask any question we had in a slow, thought-out way. Usually the doctor walks by, you grab them, ask them a million things and say goodbye within 5 minutes. I'm sure it makes it easier for everyone to have scheduled meeting times to go over everything.

They're mostly focused on her lungs and heart right now. She's taking the motrin to help close the PDA and they are going to continue with that throughout the weekend and give her another echo next week. Hopefully it will all be closed at that point!

At that point, they'll start focusing on her intestines-- trying to get them prepared to digest food. Right now they are priming the gut with small (1 mL every six hours) doses of breast milk, in the hope that they will be able to jump start the digestive process. Hopefully in the next 2-3 weeks we'll be able to do "full feeds" which means they would take out all IV nutrition and feed her only through the NG tube.

That's all for today. Thanks for stopping by!