Bright Eyes

Rowan finally opened his eyes today!

This morning we were greeted with some pretty cute little eyes! After a few days of trying hard to get his eyes open, Rowan finally succeeded! We love his precious little face!

Today was a much better day.  Rowan is still on the oscillator and his O2 levels are still kind of all over the place, but we're working on it and adjusting the settings as needed.  As the nurse practitioner said today, we need to let Rowan tell us what he needs and right now he is telling us that he needs a little bit more oxygen.

Lab wise, Rowan's CBC still looks good.  His white count has continued to fall closer to the normal range and his other numbers looked good too.  They did another blood transfusion this morning because his blood pressure was a little low and so was his hemoglobin.  We anticipate several more transfusions in his future because they have been having to draw so much blood to check his CO2 and O2 levels.  Speaking of those, Rowan's blood gases have looked much better today.  This is also a step in the right direction because it means that his body is doing a better job of getting rid of the CO2 and effectively using the oxygen.

The biggest news today was that his blood culture from May 4 is still showing negative after 48 hours and so is his blood culture from yesterday (after 24 hours).  This is such a good thing as it means that if these are still negative tomorrow, the doctors will be ready to insert a PICC line and we'll be able to remove the umbilical line.

This afternoon, John and I had a care conference with the nurse practitioner and Dr. Morgan (if you watch the news on WIBW, she is the one that they interviewed for their triplet story last night...she's pretty awesome 😊).  We basically sat down and went over how Rowan is doing from head to toe.  The nurses and doctors have done such a great job of informing us about everything that is going on with Rowan that most of the information was stuff that we had already heard.  There is a bit of concern regarding some inflammation in his lungs.  This is very common with babies that are as young as Rowan because they have to spend so much time on the ventilator.  Basically, because the lungs are exposed to so much oxygen, the just get inflamed.  This could correct itself or it can also be treated with a steroid (similar to the ones they gave me when I was admitted to the hospital two weeks ago... how has it already been two weeks????).  Dr. Morgan said that they don't like to give the steroid before 14 days old because it can have some negative side effects and he also needs to have negative blood cultures because the steroids can weaken the immune system.  This is all just a possibility, but they wanted to let us know about it.  We also talked about several of the scans and tests that they would be doing as Rowan gets older.  It was a very informative meeting.  We are so thankful for all of the things that the doctors and nurses have done for Rowan.  We have had a great experience with all of them!

The just weighed Rowan and he is up to 1 pound 9 ounces!  They were able to resume feedings today, so hopefully he will continue to pack on the pounds.

I don't want to jinx it, but it seems that we may be finally making progress on the blood infection and we continue to be hopeful that each day will bring improvements in Rowan's health.  Today was a good day!