day 6

Updates on many fronts today...

Bilirubin went down from 16 to 11 which is a good amount of progress. He's got a ways to go before he can get off the bili lights but he is moving in the right direction.

Overnight his blood gasses were kind of fluctuating, so they got the oxygen in his ventilator down to 91% but then couldn't turn it down further as he was getting to the point of not tolerating the changes. However throughout the morning and early afternoon he got some very good numbers again so they decided to drop the oxygen 3% every hour and check him again at 6 pm. Apparently overnight he was not putting up with the positioning of laying on his left side to address the atelectasis in his right lung (which was more or less unchanged on the morning chest x-ray)- but that seems to be important for him to get the good numbers as he did today when he did cooperate with laying on his side more.

Thomas is getting a bit feistier! He tries to grab his endotrachial tube from time to time. Our nurse said he's just about bound to pull it out at least once.

As Thomas is starting to do just a bit better, a few things were done today that had been waiting for him to be medically more stable. He got a bit of a sponge bath, which like any newborn, he haaated. His hair is so cute and fluffy now! He has a good head of hair and it stands up all over his head now like a tiny baby bird. They also wanted to do a spinal tap to rule out infection. His doctor is concerned about some kind of latent infection because she feels that the respiratory distress syndrome and pneumonia alone wouldn't account for how extremely sick he has been. Unfortunately for poor Thomas (and his mother's nerves) two different people attempted the spinal tap and failed. I haven't yet heard if they will just leave it at that and watch him for symptoms, or if they will try again another time. He is already on antibiotics and they have extended it to 10 days from 7 just to be sure they might catch anything lurking in there, germ-wise.