Chin up babies...

Chin up babies

No really, keep your chin up. Turns out the girls have a nasty little habit of having apnea and bradycardia. This is a fancy way of saying that every so often they decide to stop breathing which then drops their heart beat. Sometimes this happens because their chin drops and closes their teeny tiny airways, and sometimes it happens because the sneaky little monkeys just decide to stop breathing. Now if you are a medically ignorant parent, like myself, this is a pretty scary thing. You’re just sitting there loving on your baby and they stop breathing, which in turn convinces their heartbeat to slow way way down which in turn sets off a couple of alarms. Now what you expect, as a medically ignorant parent, is a sudden flurry of activity. Doctors and nurses to run in, your wife to go into hysterics, and generally people to be concerned. If this is what you expect you couldn’t be more wrong. No one comes running in, your wife glances at the screen and shrugs, and finally a nurse, or your wife casually walk over and give your baby a little pat. Often this is accompanied with a soothing voice saying something like, “Time to breathe sweety.” Now again, I’m expecting a frantic voice saying something like “BREATHE! ###%^!!” But again you couldn’t be more wrong. Now after a few times of this happening you begin to demand answers from your medically literate wife. You expect some technical answer but what you get is, “Oh they do that. We call it A’s and B’s. All preemies do it.” They do that? Preemies just forget to breathe? A’s and B’s? You know what I get when I put A’s and B’s together? Ab. That’s it. And if we have multiple A’s and B’s then I get Ababababab. But what do I know? I’m an ex-reading teacher turned vicar. Evidently this is just something I am going to have to get used to.
In other news Emma Jane had her echo today. Good news and bad news. The hole is still there, but it is smaller. So it looks like the ibuprofen is working, albeit slowly. The current plan is to give her another couple of doses and check her heart again tomorrow or the day after. Things are not going quite as smoothly with Parker. She received her first dose of ibuprofen yesterday but now we find she is not peeing. Ibuprofen is hard on premature kidneys so her urine output has decreased. The doctors are giving her extra fluids to try and get her to pee more so that any future doses of ibuprofen will do minimal temporary damage to her kidneys. When we left they had given her extra fluids but she still wasn’t peeing enough. So, one of my prayers tonight is that Parker would pee. I never figured I one day find myself praying for the pee of my daughter. But…here I am.

All this said, things are going fairly well. Again I want to thank all of you for your prayers and support. God bless, and good night.