Cori Lou would like to eat, but then again, she wouldn’t. That is to say, she shows all kinds of rooting and sucking behavior, but so far has only intermittently been able to tolerate 10 ml of her mommy’s milk every 3 hours. What they do is check her stomach contents right before the feeding to make sure she is digesting it all. Just a couple of times, she has still had enough in there that they held off of anything more at the moment “by mouth.” Since she is still being supported by IV nutrition, this can be done. Things seem to be coming out the other end of the pipes reasonably well, though.
Another issue has been that if she gets a bit upset, her respirations get going so fast that she can’t breathe reasonably enough to suck from a (very small) bottle. However, the orders were just changed so that if the fast breathing is the only issue, she will still be getting the milk via her nasogastric tube. This is what is happening at the end of the video today. They use the pacifier a bit to help her calm down for receiving the milk in her tummy.
We are told not to be concerned that her weight is down to just a smidge below birth weight today. On the average, all week she has gained weight, being up nicely from the losses after surgery.
She was not cooperative about getting her stitches out, but they finally managed to remove them this morning. There are now steri-strips over it and the site is still healing nicely.
Heidi has been dealing with some nasty mastitis. It didn’t respond to the first antibiotics, so she had a very miserable weekend. Now, she has been switched to another antibiotic that they don’t want Cori to ingest, so none of the milk is being saved for now. But Heidi is still successfully pumping to keep up the supply for when she and Cori are both ready for the real mommy-baby nursing.
Aunt Betharoni and Aunt Carlie both got to hold Cori Lou today. All in all, Cori is still getting held quite a bit. Now that Heidi has been cleared to drive, she is able to get to the hospital more regularly.
