Happy Thanksgiving, and wonderful news!

First, I'd like to wish all of our family and friends a Happy Thanksgiving. We certainly have a lot to be thankful for this year!

With Aidan's delicate condition, and since we have just entered cold and flu season, we are not supposed to take Aidan out of the house except for doctor appointments, and we are supposed to limit the number of people he sees. We are paranoid about Aidan catching a cold, which would be really rough on him with his immature lungs.

So we had a very small get together for Thanksgiving this year. We had Aidan's brother Andrew, and Aidan's grandparents Marshall and Charlotte. Charlotte was nice enough to cook us a very nice Thanksgiving dinner.







On Wednesday, Aidan's pediatrician suggested it was time to try Aidan without oxygen. So Wednesday from 11am - 11pm, we did this. We were too scared to leave Aidan off oxygen all night, and we didn't want to stay up in shifts watching him, so we put him back on the oxygen for the night.

On Thanksgiving morning, we again removed the oxygen. We kept a close eye on Aidan all day, watching for a change in his skin color. We usually look for a change in the color of his lips. In the NICU, when Aidan would de-saturate into the 60s (or worse), Aidan's lips would first turn from pink to pale, then grey, and then blue. All day on Thursday, we never noticed any change in color, so we think he did really well.

At bed time, we needed to decide if we would put Aidan back on the oxygen, or take the nervous step to keep Aidan off the oxygen for a full night. On Friday morning, Aidan had another pediatrician appointment, so if we could make it through the night, we could test him with a pulse oximeter in the morning after he had been off oxygen for a full 24 hours. That would tell us a lot about what he is capable of. If we put him back on oxygen for the night, he would only be off oxygen for a couple hours and the oximetry test to me wouldn't mean as much.

So we decided now was the time to test Aidan, and we would leave him off oxygen for the night; so we set the alarm clock to wake us up every 1.5 to 2 hours to check on him. We did still have him on the heart and apnea monitor, but we're not sure how bad his blood oxygen would need to get to actually set off one of these alarms, so we still wanted to check his skin color often throughout the night.

Aidan made it through the night just fine. He actually woke us up every 1 - 2 hours to eat, which was before the alarm clock ever went off.

So we went to the pediatrician appointment at 9:30am today for Aidan's second RSV vaccine. Before the shot, we hooked Aidan up to the pulse oximeter to see how he was doing. The very first reading was 98%!! This was huge news, and means that 9:30am on Thanksgiving could be the last time Aidan is on supplemental oxygen!

On November 1st when we left the NICU, Dr Kaempf told us that he expected Aidan to need oxygen for 4-6 weeks. Today is 1 day short of 4 weeks. If any of the nurses from the NICU reads this, please let Dr Kaempf know Aidan has made it off oxygen.

So tonight, we'll remove the TenderGrip tape from his face since Aidan doesn't need the cannula anymore!!