Day 5: February 19th
This morning I went down to visit Ryker, and his heart rate was really elevated, ranging between the 200-215 bpm. They tried giving him a bump of fentanyl to help him relax his heart rate. They were throwing out possible causes of his elevated HR, from needing a blood transfusion, to possible infection, or as simple as dehydration. They decided to bump his fluid levels up to see if that would make a difference since he’s a peeing machine. I went back to my room for lunch, and came back to visit Ryker after they started the extra fluids. His heart rate had dropped back down significantly! So apparently he was just super dehydrated (so glad it was that simple!). His green spit up also has tamed down since they started venting his feeding tube. Also, his bilirubin levels were down, so he is no longer glowing blue.
Today is discharge day for me, which is bitter sweet. I haven’t been home in 5 weeks. It’ll be lovely to see the girls (and home!) again! But it’ll be so hard to leave our little guy an hour and a half away. I’ll be back up tomorrow as Nick was able to snatch the family room for 2 days. I can hang with our little dude a bit longer and adjust to the new norm of balancing home life with our little guy in Denver.
They did a heart echo earlier in the day as well, to see if his heart is making progress in healing the small hole he has. It’s something commonly seen, especially in babies this little, and more often than not heals itself over. We heard back that his heart is looking even better than a few days prior, and blood is starting to flow more in the right direction.
They were working on weaning him off the oscillator today in hopes that he can transfer to the conventional ventilator tonight or tomorrow. He’s making good progress!
Pics of our little guy today, and a better visual scale of how little he is as he holds on to daddy’s finger.
