great news!

Thursday, July 9
Faith had surgery this morning to fix her scar where the Denver surgeons went into the same one three times. Dr. Puder did it, and it ended up being a little more involved than he anticipated, so he was concerned that she might need to stay in the hospital overnight to help control her pain. Fortunately, as soon as she really woke up from the anesthetic, she gave the nurse a big smile and showed us she was going to be just fine. We got out of the post-op area around 12:15 or so and headed over for our CAIR appointment, and by the time the docs came in, she was squirming and rolling all over the place, lifting her legs up to her stomach, and acting like nothing had happened at all! She had a little while earlier when she needed some Tylenol and wasn't too happy, but even then, it wasn't bad at all, and she has been her usual smiley self.
The best news of all- she's over 60% enteral feeds now, and growing well, so we are going to be dropping from 6 nights a week of TPN to FOUR!! So instead of just hooking her up to replacement fluids on Thursday night, now she'll just get fluids Thursday, Saturday, and either Monday or Tuesday. Everyone was SO impressed with how great she looks and how big she's getting. They're still waiting to hear from the manufacturer about Cisapride, and the best estimate is that it will be 3 weeks or so until they do, so hopefully by then we'll know for sure if she needs it. Because she has done well with the more aggressive increasing schedule for feeds, I'm going to keep that up for as long as she tolerates it. I'm planning to go up by at least 2 mL/week, if not 3, depending how well she does.
The only bad/disappointing news is that we are going to be introducing formula now. I am out of frozen breastmilk at this point, and not getting enough when I pump to keep up with her bag. I am hoping to keep her still on as much breastmilk as I possibly can, but when I don't have anything to fill her bag up, she'll be getting Neocate. They are optimistic that she might actually be able to transition to regular milk when she's a year old with very little issue, too, which was a surprise to me.
Our dinner tonight didn't work out as planned, unfortunately Ellie wasn't feeling well and had to head in to the hospital to get checked out, and the other family that was originally planning on coming got some bad news today I guess. I also ran into Blaise and her parents in the hospital lobby, but they weren't able to join us either, so it was just Faith and I and Sam and his family. It was still great to visit with them though and I really enjoyed meeting them and having a good chance to chat after having talked to them online for quite awhile.
Well, Faith and I have a pretty early flight tomorrow and have to go to the hospital first so Dr. Puder can change the dressing on her incision... it was brought to my attention today that I need to update the picture on the page title, which I had noticed awhile back but didn't get a chance to do. I will get rid of that old yellow picture and replace it with our nice pink girl as soon as I can though! It amazes me now looking back at old pictures how bad she really looked, and then to think that I thought she looked really GOOD then... Now that she really truly does look good, no one even can tell she's not just a normal, healthy baby! We've come a LONG way in not a very long time....