9-9-10

Oliver is 3 weeks old today! Yesterday after his bath and breastfeeding, it tired him out. He was having trouble sleeping due to some withdrawal symptoms including a high heart rate into the 200's, elevated respiratory rate into the 80's and irritability. I did have the nurse give him a dose of morphine in the evening because it's hard to watch your child work so hard to do normal things like breathing. After that dose of morphine and letting him settle down he did sleep well last night.

Today the nurse practioner talked to me about how I felt about going down on the morphine today. I stated that I would rather keep him at the 10mcg as he was at yesterday for today to let him come down slowly. She agreed but the attending physician wanted to change him to oral morphine anyway at an equalivalent oral dosage of 0.3mg every 4 hours. He did well with the change of the oral morphine and that actually relaxes him better than the continuous infusion of morphine he was getting through the PICC line. I breastfed him 3 times today and he's doing much better it's still just so confusing and hard to know if he is actually getting enough. Tomorrow the lactation consultant made an appointment to watch me feed Oliver.

Oxygen wise, they decreased his concentration today to 21% which is the normal concentration in the air but still at 1 liter. His saturations at that was in the mid to low 90s all day. He continues to have mild retractions to his rib muscles which means he does work hard to breathe at times.

Today I talked to the nurse practioner also about when we start normal newborn things like hearing test and vaccinations and the nurse gave me all the information and told me what I need to be working on to such as watching a few videos and reading more information. All the talk about discharge made me very excited although I don't want to rush anything and I want Oliver to tolerate the morphine and be able to eat and breathe. Oliver is running the show and all I can do is be prepared to take him home and help him along the way. Shawn comes back tomorrow and it will be a crazy weekend here in Iowa City on Saturday with the game. Just a side note on the game. I met Kirk Ferentz in the hall today as I was leaving! He actually said hello and asked me how I was doing.