September 18, 2008: Day 18 (Aidan acts his age)

Many of Aidan's first 17 days he did much better than you would expect, and was acting like he was older than he really is. Today, Aidan was starting to act his age. He had a fair amount of trouble keeping up his oxygen levels, and had several heart rate dips. Yesterday, he spent much of the day on room air, but today he needed 24 - 26% oxygen to keep from de-saturating. Right now as I write this, he is on 25% oxygen and is mostly stable in the mid 80s.

He did gain more weight today! I was very surprised since he gained a bunch yesterday, I was expecting him to be flat, or even lose a little today. He is now 1050 grams (2 lbs 5 oz). By the end of the weekend, he could be 2 1/2 pounds!

Here's me, right now:



At 11am, we had a CPAP malfunction that caused Aidan's oxygen level to crash again into the low 60s, and stay there for several minutes. The nurse finally removed the nose piece, and re-set it. Once this was done, Aidan quickly recovered.

Then after that, it happened again and the nurse finally called the RT back to remove, and re-set Aidan's CPAP. Once this was done, Aidan seemed to stabilize. It was getting late (after midnight). I waited a few minutes and Aidan was still doing well, so I went home. Such is life with a baby in the NICU.

THEN, when I got home, I discovered that we have water pipe leaking in the ceiling above the kitchen!!! We spent an hour trying to figure out where the water was coming from, and I finally had to cut a hole in the ceiling. (Yes, this is the ceiling we had redone just 2 years ago. Now it has a hole in it again)

It's 1:40am, I'm going to bed and hoping for a better day tomorrow. I'm going to go back and re-read yesterday's post so I can feel better...

Update: It's now 2:20am. While we were getting ready for bed, water started to spray out of the leaking pipe, and we needed to put some epoxy on it to hold for the night...