Four Week Mark

Today Elias is 4 weeks old. It is hard to believe that much time has passed, but it also feels like an eternity. Yesterday, as we hope you saw in the video below, was the first time Katharine was able to hold Elias. She held him for 2 hours. You could tell Elias was loving it; he was so restful and calm. It was such an amazing sight to see.

The last few days have been pretty uneventful for Elias, which is a good thing. They have him stable and the feeding has begun again. They did make a slight change in his feeding tube and positioned it beyond the stomach and further into the digestive tract. They did this because one of the possibilities for last week's setback is that he aspirated the food into his lungs due to a reflux from the stomach. They gave him some medicine for reflux as well as pushing the tube further down in hopes of preventing a repeat. He has been feeding for 36 hours now and this morning increased the amount they are feeding him from 1 cc/hr to 2 cc/hr. We were also told this morning that he is starting to develop a little fluid retention. They are giving him lasix to try and reduce this. They also went up a little on the vent settings. When they x-rayed him today the lungs were not quite as expanded as they would like to see so the change was ordered. We are not quite sure yet what that means in terms of extubating him. This is hopefully just a minor setback. We should be talking with the doctors at some point today and this will give us some more insight on all of this.