01/28/2007

There is very little to report today. I had one of the doctors come by to talk to me today about Emery. Basically, Emery's lungs are on the worse side of what they have seen. They are not the worst they have ever seen. I didn't have the heart to ask if those babies survived or not. He said to expect a 6-month hospital stay at least for Emery, which means he would come home some time in June. That seems an eternity. Three more weeks in utero would have cut 4 months off of his hospital stay, with the small exception that he was done growing. There is nothing I could have done to have kept him in there any longer. I like to try and put blame on myself like the fact that I didn't take prenatal vitamins for the first 11 weeks because I was too sick or the fact that my iron was so low I should have been taking iron pills or that I was overweight when I got pregnant, but they have all told me there was nothing that could have been done differently to change the outcome. We're both lucky to be alive right now. It's funny, I quit drinking and smoking and somehow ended up with high blood pressure. Go figure. I actually read one study that showed that pregnant women who smoked had a smaller chance of having preeclampsia, yet those women had preterm labor anyway. I can't win. There are always 'unforseen' complications which could cause serious problems with Emery that do cause death, but obviously they can't predict them. One of them is obviously infection, and they do try to catch them right away in order to treat them as soon as possible. Emery is growing well. His weight is 2 pounds 10 ounces, which means he is twice his birth weight. He said Emery's lungs will never be 'good' or normal-looking, but he also said that it is impossible to predict what he could look like at age 50 because they have only been saving babies Emery's size for about 10 years, which means that medical science could come up with something in 10 years that would fix the problem or God could always give us a miracle. I prefer the latter myself. I figure whatever man can do God can certainly do better. Emery's oxygen requirements are high today, around 65%, and his saturations are all over but he's recovering from his desaturations much quicker than usual. The doctor said to celebrate baby steps and small, small milestones in Emery's life. He is tolerating feeding well and he is growing and he has had no brain bleed. Those are significant obstacles to overcome in preemies. Right now I'm not really trying to look past what will happen after Emery comes off the vent. He will likely spend another 6 weeks on it. Our only hope right now is that his lungs heal enough to come off the ventilator. His PDA still seems to be closed. For those of you who are worried, I'm not very depressed today. In fact, I feel pretty peaceful. It's just me and Emery hanging out. I've been singing to him. Every once in a while he pops opens his eyes to see what's going on. We love you all and thanks for the comments! Keep them coming. They make my day :) Love, Sarah, Erik and Emery