A good day...

Thursday, December 4
We have been in the NICU for three weeks now. Twenty-one days. They've gone really fast... but at the same time, it feels like forever. And it will probably be at least another month until we can go home...
Faith had a really good day today. Our nurse today was Tori, and she had a student nurse with her, Liz. They were both good. Faith has seemed like she felt better today. She did need some extra pain medications, but we also messed with her quite a bit- she had her left PICC line taken out because it stopped working and her arm swelled up, Tori and Liz changed the dressings on her chest tubes, and we changed her bedding... And once that PICC line was out, they had to play with her meds a little bit, and turn some things off to give her other things, because now she has fewer places to put things into her, and the Octreotide and TPN can't mix with a lot of things. Her arterial line is still working (new record!), reading her blood pressure well and they're still able to draw blood from it... but it is leaking blood all around it, so the tape holding it in place is all full of blood. She looks a lot less swollen though, and has had less drainage from her chest tubes today (which could be good or bad, we'll know after her x-ray in the morning). Everyone who sees her on a fairly regular basis is impressed, and we're all cautiously optimistic that maybe she is turning the corner...
Dave's parents came and visited for awhile today. It was nice to see them, and I'm glad they came on a good day, because I'm sure for people who don't see her every day, a bad day might be a little scary to see. I'm starting to get used to her ups and downs. I think the hardest thing for me is that I have to force myself not to get too excited or happy about good days, because it makes the bad days feel even worse than they really are.
Dave will be down either tonight or tomorrow morning, depending on how the roads are. It snowed pretty much all day. It was really cold and awful, but the snow was pretty to look at as it came down. Some poor maintenance people were stuck outside shoveling sidewalks all day- I couldn't believe that they don't have the little ATV things with the plows on the front... they actually just have 2 or 3 guys out there with snow shovels and salt! I bet they love their jobs...
Dave and I are going in the morning to the Milk Bank at Presbyterian/St Luke's Hospital to learn how to make "skim" breastmilk. Not that Faith will be eating any time soon, but I like to have all my ducks in a row, so to speak, and it will make me feel better to know that when she is able to eat, she will be able to have my breastmilk instead of formula. I think it will be better to get it done now, too, because Mary Ann told me today that they will probably be pretty adamant about making sure that the milk is tested for fat content before they feed it to her, and they don't have a very accurate way to test that at this hospital, so it will have to be done at P/SL. Which means that I will have to go through the screening process there, so that they can process my milk and test it using their equipment. I have a ton of questions to ask them... I need to write my questions down so I remember them all.
Dave gets to have a 4-day weekend; since his job is letting him work four 10-hour days now, he is taking Friday and Monday off, so we'll get to have 5 nights and 4 days together. I realized earlier today that this weekend will be the most amount of time that we've spent together since we found out about all of this back in September. That was three months ago...
Thank you to everyone for continuing to keep us in your thoughts and prayers! Please continue to pray that the medication will work and she will get better soon!