
Other than Cori Lou regularly managing to dislodge her omphalocele dressing, there is not a lot going on. The dressing needs to stay in place so that the membrane over the protrusion (which is not as moisture proof as skin) will not dry out. So here are the other highlights:
- She got her IV relocated, because IV sites, especially on little babies tend to get worn out and inflamed pretty quickly. They want to move the IV location before any one site gets injured. You can see the redness on her left hand where it used to be.
- She got her glycerin enemas (every 6 hours), to help get the meconium out of her digestive tract. It works some each time and she does not seem very bothered by it.
- They noted that her bilirubin levels are just a bit high. She may get some light therapy tomorrow.
- No word from the other doctors about brain, kidneys, etc. Here’s hoping no news is good news.
- The suction pressure from the tube in her mouth, which actually goes all the way into her stomach, was decreased some so that it causes less irritation to her stomach lining. There had been a tiny little bit of blood.
- She has lost about 9 ounces, approximately 10% of her body weight, but they have adjusted IV feedings to help. The thoughts are that it is due to being more dehydrated than at birth, because of both the omphalocele membrane and the gastric suction. Her fluids are being closely monitored, including weighing each diaper and measuring all fluids through the gastric suction, even the normal saline solution they use to flush it out and keep it clean.
- There is some positional edema, since she can not be moved and held like a “normal” baby. They make it a point to reposition her every 4 hours to help with this and other potential problems from laying too much in one place. Plus, she is kicking and stretching fairly often, so that helps.
- Cori Lou is still getting little tastes of colostrum. Today’s method was to stimulate sucking for a moment on a finger, then putting 2 drops of the colostrum on the finger.
- Cori Lou likes a hand lightly moving around on her head and calms down quite a bit when spoken to in a soft voice up close to her.
Heidi is dealing with spinal headaches since 5 PM last night. For today, she couldn’t be upright more than 15 minutes without severe head pain, so that limited going down to see Cori. She did get in a couple of quick visits in the morning. Heidi is using her mobile time to get in some walking in. She has been coached in how to continue with pumping milk with the machine while laying down and things are progressing well in that department.
As far as anyone knows, Cori Lou’s abdominal surgery is still planned for Monday morning, but they have been told that the pediatric surgery schedule is notoriously unpredictable.