Rubber Duck

Hayden had a good day yesterday. Kelsea started nursing him at 10 AM and nursed him two more times throughout the day. He kept all of his food down and had zero spit ups or vomits. He started to pass the barium through his system and it looked like modeling clay when it came out.

All test results came back negative in terms of him having any type of infection and they still couldn't find any specific reason that was causing him to not keep his feeds down. His hernia is reducible and is still not a concern to the surgeons. They said as long as it continues to be reducible and does not get stuck that they would wait to do surgery until he gets older, probably at the same time they do his closure surgery. The surgeons don't like putting a baby this young under general anesthesia.

We are very grateful for a good family friend, Dawn, who was able to help us out with a hotel room last night. I made it to the hospital by 6 o'clock again this morning and Kelsea is hopefully getting some sleep right now. She needs it after we were woken up at midnight by kids running and jumping off the bed in the room above us. The front desk solution was that I could get some earplugs that would help us sleep through the night or we could switch rooms because they had just checked in and have three young kids. You can imagine how well that went over with me at midnight when she said to give them a half hour and if they haven't calmed down then to let her know again. The problem was solved once I put my shoes on and went down to the front desk. I was also very grateful that the front desk called me at 12:45 AM to make sure that we could not hear anymore noise!!!! I almost forgot, but one other solution was that WE could switch rooms at 12 AM as well!

The neonatologist just came by and agrees with the nurse that she would like to get us home today. I am waiting on surgery to do their rounds and see what they say. Hayden has taken down all of his bottles and nursed quite a bit. He just sucked down 100 mL of breast milk for dad.

I'm pretty certain they will kick us out today and we will be home in a few hours. Luckily the discharge process this time around will be a lot faster and hopefully we can get out of here before noon.

Dr. Warner came by yesterday and was thoroughly impressed with Hayden's progress. He was pleased at how his omphalocele looks and also said that the skin is growing wonderfully. He then told us that we could finally give Hayden a full bath and we could get him completely wet. That made Kelsea and I very excited to try something new. Guess its time to break out the rubber duck!


Update:
Surgery made it by and they are good with him getting out of here and said they would leave it up to the NICU team. I'm not a brain surgeon, but I think when neither side thinks he needs to stay, and you add two and two, that means we get to get out of here....again!