4 Days Old

4 Days Old
Daddy holding her up to burp her mid-meal.

We visited her yesterday for a little over an hour.

Joseph gets tired with sitting and I get worn out from being out and about.

It's hard to spend much time with Blaire right now since she is still tanning. We can't hold her til she is off the lights and we still don't know how long that will be.

Dad went to visit her early this morning while we all were still asleep. He commented on how Blaire has the tendancy to get all her wires wrapped around her left foot and pull all the leads off her chest to send the alarms "Blairing!" =)

When Joseph and I visited she was quite fidgetty.

Joseph turned on some quiet piano music and played it above her head to calm her. I noticed that holding her hands and stroking her fingers or placing my hand on the side of her face calms her.

She is having a bit of difficulty taking a bottle and so when she stops sucking the feeding tube is turned on. Being on the feeding tube has helped with her vomiting. Her biliruben levels are on the higher side so she is under the blue lights (tanning) for a while until her levels are lowered. She has the large lights above her bed on both sides and then is also laying on a "bili blanket" to get the most of the lights that she can. Dad said Drs are having a meeting this morning to discuss her treatment and hopefully give us any sort of timeline of being on the lights.

Her symptoms of withdrawl are slightly higher than the previous day so when Joseph and I went, there was no holding her.  Her withdrawl symptoms are:

- sensitivity to light -

- jittery/ shaky- needs to be held/touched in order to be calmed -

- sensitivity to sound - 

- sneezing excessively - 

- yawning excessively -

-

She is on Morphine every 4 hours which is helping with the symptoms and they evaluate her daily to see if she needs more or less meds. Her blood sugars have fully stabilized and her IV has been taken out, so that is improvement!

She is quite the squishy "little" thing! I think some of it is swelling still since she seems to be little less squishy each time I see her. She has a very small bone structure and her head feels so tiny in my hand. Everyone says she's huge! but it doesn't totally feel that way to me. I think her eyes will match the blue of Blake's. I've seen her open her eyes momentarily only twice. That will just have to come in time. She is down to 10 lbs 3 oz, so she has lost 11 oz in the last few days.

I'm getting my meds slimmed down. My ankle and back pain has dropped down to almost nothing. I had a severe ankle pain episode immediately after she was born, but since then, I've had nearly no pain! Mom jokes that I'm allergic to pregnancy =)  While in the hospital I asked the nurse if I'd be able to drop from 3 pills a day down to 2 pills a day of the morphine. She looked at her notes and said that the docs had already done that at 4am. I was surprised but then quite annoyed when she stated that they took the pills down to twice a day but the increased the overall dose to be much higher than I was already on. I wasn't having any pain and they increased the dose without even telling me! I want OFF THESE MEDS! Not to increase them. So, coming home, I'm at the meds I was when I got to the hospital initially. I'm planning on decreasing to two doses when Blaire is 1 week old and will see how it goes.