And he’s off

At approximately 4:30 yesterday afternoon, Colin was finally able to come off the ventilator and onto the high-flow oxygen. I was able to hold him while the nurse took out the ventilator tube and taped on the cannula. That part went smoothly, but it took Colin much longer than they had hoped to bring his saturation levels back up. 

They had to raise the rate and amount of oxygen quite high to get him stabilized initially. The doctor said to keep him on the high-flow and just take it hour by hour. I was quite relieved when John came home last night and Colin was still holding his own without the ventilator, and even more so when we called this morning and he was still doing fine. While we have no guarantees, it now seems much more likely that he’ll be able to stay off the ventilator for good. 

Now we just need him to put all his energy into growing. He is hovering around 1100 grams for weight, and he needs to get up to at least 1600 to graduate into one of the nurseries (and be near his sister). He has been doing well in terms of tolerating his feeding, but has been spending a lot of energy fighting the respirator. My hope is, now that the tube is gone, that he will feel less need to fight (physically, at least) and can settle down and grow. 

Veronica also had a momentous day yesterday — she drank her entire feeding by bottle. Her nurse was so excited that she unhooked Veronica from her monitors and brought her (and the empty bottle) down to Colin’s bedside to show me. 

Slowly, but surely, we seem to be making progress toward getting our little babies ready to be “born” into the outside world. They’re such a part of our lives that it is hard to remember that under normal circumstances, they would still be inside me, and we would not have met them yet.