Big Boy!

Yesterday Owen's nurse, Mona, had really good luck with him taking milk from a nipple at his 9AM feeding. She puts the tube with the milk (that normally attaches to his feeding tube) into a nipple and lets him suck the milk out. It is great practice for him. He ate about 10 ml this way before he got tired. He was awake and alert at noon, so she decided to try an actual bottle. This gives him a lot more control over how much milk he takes. He's too young to accept a whole feeding this way, but he did really well! He took about 13 of his 38 ml! She said that the more we practice this, the better he'll get at it until one feeding, it will just click and he'll get it from that point on.

Any long-term patient at the NICU gets assigned a social worker to help be a resource for the family. We met with ours this morning to start formulating a discharge plan. They think that Owen could potentially come home with us within the next 2 weeks!!! I thought it would be more of a planned date of discharge, but in reality, it sounds like we may know the day before and that is it. Once the nurses feel like he's got the feeding down pat, the neonatalogist will order a 3 hour test to monitor his breathing and his spells. The nurses will chart exactly what he is doing during any spell he has during those 3 hours so the next day they can look over the results and understand better when he is having spells (if he is still having spells). After that, they do a hearing test on him and they do what is called a car seat test. They put him in his car seat for one hour to make sure that he doesn't slouch down and restrict his own airway. If they see the results they are looking for, we leave with Owen. In fact, they even had us bring his car seat this morning so that it is there ready to go at any time.

I am very excited to have him home and to be able to hold him as we please, etc., but I'd be lying if I said that bringing him home didn't make me a little nervous. Right now he is attached to monitors that tell us when something is wrong. We also have an army of very well trained nurses that come running any time something isn't right. At home, it will just be the 3 of us trying to figure it out on our own. I'm sure every new parent goes through a little bit of apprehension, so I know that I'm not alone!

We can't get over his progress this week. It has been unbelievable how much more alert he is. He is our miracle!