Update

(Original appeared May 3, 2016)

We hope you all don’t get too bored with all the technical jargon and medical updates. We are learning much more about neonatal medicine than we ever would have expected!
Jacob’s urine output is still low. They ran a catheter and nothing really happened. This suggests to me that the issue is at the kidney level, and not on down the “line” so to speak. They’ve decided to keep the meds going, but at a different dosage rate. They will actually ramp it back up. While this means he won’t go back to breast milk any time soon, we’re not yet giving up on kick-starting those kidneys. We really hope this new approach works, because he doesn’t appear that he can hold any more fluids. It’s difficult to describe just how puffy he looks now. Even his little fingers are so swollen that he can’t grip very well at the moment.
His recent blood work suggested an inflammation of some kind. They are running a follow up blood test to try to pinpoint why, but the initial thought is some sort of infection. They will resume antibiotics and are trying to figure out which one to use.
They also tried to reconfigure his vent settings a bit to work with the air leak around the tube in his throat. Right now, he has the smallest tube available. But he’s growing and his throat is expanding a bit, which causes leaks around the tube. They could insert a new, larger tube. However, the next size up is quite large – probably still too large for him. If they insert the larger tube, they risk puncturing his airway, etc. So we’ve tried to stick with this smaller tube for as long as we can. Yet, the leak is bad enough that he’s not getting all of the air/oxygen that’s being pumped in. In my last post, I mentioned that we tried a pacifier which had the positive side effect of helping to seal off that leak a bit which then caused his O2 levels to rise. This is an indication that a larger tube would work if they could safely insert it.
Other than those things, all seems to be as well as can be expected. It’s so nice to see nurses from down the hallway peek in on Jacob from time to time even though they don’t have him as their patient that day. I think he’s made a few girlfriends over these last 3 weeks. Stud muffin.