Room Air

Edward is officially on room air for the first time!!!  Yesterday morning, his nasal cannula was removed and he has been breathing on his own since! He still has small desaturations every now and then, but overall, he is handling it beautifully and we are hopeful he can remain off the oxygen forever!  Obviously, this is a tremendous step forward and we could not be more pleased.

Furthermore, the following statements have been made recently by Edward's team of doctors, NP's and nurses.

"There is light at the end of the tunnel."
"Do you have the nursery totally ready?"
"You should start buying diapers."
"You might be home by Easter."

Whoa.

Clearly, we are on the downslope of our time in the NICU and not a moment too soon.  Though we have had superb care here at UVA , Katie and I cannot wait to bring our little boy home.  In fact, especially now that the weather has started to turn nice, we often half-jokingly talk about stealing him for the afternoon, just to walk him in his stroller.  The poor guy has not had the opportunity to feel a single ray of sunshine in his first three months of life.

There are a couple more obstacles to bringing him home.  As Katie mentioned in her last post, he is still working on the breathing/sucking/swallowing coordination in relation to feeding.  He has made a fair amount of progress over the past few days in regards to this, but the goal is to have him take all of his nutrition by mouth (either bottle- or breastfeeding), nothing through the NG tube and be gaining weight.  We are not quite there yet.

He also has to have hernia surgery next week.  Inguinal hernias are quite common in premature boys and he definitely has one of the left and we think he has one on the right.  So next Tuesday, he will be taken down to the operating room for a bilateral inguinal hernia repair.  Fortunately, this is a relatively minor surgery and recovery should only be a day or two.  He will have to be intubated again, but they anticipate that he will only be intubated for a few hours post-operatively.

We are tantalizingly close.  Of course, once we are home, we will be faced with a new baby and I know this will have its own challenges.  But at least we will be at home!  Almost there.