Briella - 4 days old

Today, Briella is four days old. She is such a sweety and it is already getting hard leaving her in the hospital! The CPAP was turned off yesterday and she is still getting some extra oxygen via a little cannula under her nose. I've been able to hold her (yay!) and she loves snuggling. Yesterday she cried when I put her down at the end of visiting hours :( 

Medically speaking, things are moving along slowly. Briella has been seen by most of the specialists who need to evaluate her and the prognosis seems good. The two things that we are waiting for before we can bring her home (in my understanding) is 1) her breathing needs to improve a bit - she's still having some "insucking" around the rib cage when she breaths, meaning that she's straining a bit. She also has some stridor but chances are she'll have that for a while. I still think that her breathing is stronger than Maddy's was at birth, and the doctor who was looking after Maddy agrees. 2) she is still being fed by the NG tube. She needs to start feeding orally. I'm HOPING that this will start taking place next week. 

Apart from that, everything else, I believe, will mostly be done as an outpatient. The ENT is not insisting on an immediate bronchoscopy (unlike our situation with Maddy) and is happy to follow up with that later. Orthopedically, her x-rays of her spine don't completely rule out every issue, however they don't raise any major red flags either so we will be cautious and follow up with that later too. Her hips, like Maddy's, are not fantastic - however unlike Maddy, our current ortho sees no benefit in using a pavlik harness. 

Her feet are going to be a difficulty though. Maddy has fantastic feet for her diagnosis and I don't know why, I just assumed that Briella would too. Briella however has the more "typical" diastrophic club feet that often are very difficult to correct. At this stage, our ortho is planning to start serial casting for them when she is around a month old.

Briella is drinking more and more these days and so in the next day or two should be able to have her IV removed - yay for one less cord! We still haven't been given any particular time frame for how long she will be in, but we are praying and keeping our fingers crossed... it is exhausting pumping, looking after two older kids and running back and forth from the hospital sometimes multiple times a day. I can't wait until our family of five is together!