October 3, 2008: Day 33 (First bottle)

Today we had a new nurse, Ester. When she saw Aidan sucking vigorously on his pacifier this morning, she decided to give bottle feeding a try for the first time. She said Aidan wasn't really sure what to do with the liquid in his mouth at first, and just let it sit there. But then after a while he started to get it, and began to suck, swallow, and breath. She said he did pretty well and made it through most of his 17cc of milk, but then got pretty tired.

Dr Kaempf decided to switch Aidan's time between feedings from 2 to 3 hours. This is nice, since it gives him that extra hour to rest between cares. However, this changes Aidan from a meal of 17cc to a meal of 25cc. This is a big meal for such a little guy.

OK, let's see how much milk I'd need to drink every 3 hours by comparison: Aidan is about 1.5 kilograms and I'm about 85 kilograms. So that makes me 57 times larger than him. So I'd need to drink 25*57 = 1.425 liters of milk every 3 hours, or 11.4 liters a day. For those metrically-challenged out there, that's 3 gallons of milk a day, or 21 gallons a week. Also Aidan is drinking fortified milk that is more like a milk shake. So this is actually more like drinking 3 gallons of milk shakes every day.

No wonder digesting all of this milk is hard on Aidan. Tonight for his 11pm feeding, we saw how hard this hits Aidan's system. We had just changed his diaper, and nurse Uyen set up his feeding. As soon as it hit Aidan's stomach, you could see him tense up, and his heart rate started to drop. It stayed abnormally low for him (110-130 bpm), until all 25cc emptied into his stomach, and then it returned back to a normal level of 150 bpm. After that, Uyen decided to use the feeding pump to deliver the meal more slowly over 10-15 minutes.

Denyse also tried to breast feed Aidan a little this afternoon. He was really tired from the bottle feeding in the morning, and ran out of energy and fell asleep quickly. She'll try again tomorrow; Ester said she won't bottle feed Aidan tomorrow.

Some pictures from today:





We switched to a bigger pacifier today, so Aidan wouldn't get used to one with a nipple that was too small. Yes, it is half the size of his head.







He's not yellow. I was trying out a night vision setting on the camera.

Aidan gained only 8 grams today (but remember he gained 58 yesterday, so no worries here. He's now 1480 grams (3 lbs 4.2 oz).