A Real Boy

Last week was a bittersweet week for us. Landon turned 3 months old and reached his due date. In a perfect world, he would be home by now. We say he is now a 'real boy' a la Pinocchio. We did have some good news last week. On Monday, the eye doctor came and let us know that the drug they injected on Thursday had worked and he no longer was at the threshold to need eye surgery in his left eye. His right eye was still ok. We were thrilled. This doesn't mean that he will never need eye surgery, but it at least puts it off for a little while longer. He will get weekly eye exams to keep an eye on it. (Haha pun intended).

On the feeding front, they continue to increase the amount of breast milk he gets through his feeding tube while decreasing the nutrient fluid called TPN that he has been dependent on since birth. Adding to this fun (warning the following sentence involves poop), they have started taking out the output of poop from his ostomy bag and 'refeeding' it into his lower intestine. This basically causes him to poop twice, once in the bag and once the normal way. They do this to get his lower intestine to start working before they try to reattach it. This also allows Landon to absorb more calories since a lot of the body's nutrient absorption happens in the lower intestine. If he continues to tolerate his feedings, he will eventually be able to try to bottle feed. Given the way he LOVES sucking on his binky, we hope that he will have little problem bottle feeding.

We were also happy to find out that our July doctor team is actually a flashback from April with Dr. D as our attending and Dr. Karen as our fellow! Even more fun is that we randomly know our two interns, Dr. Courtney and Dr. Megan from outside of the hospital. I went to grade school with Dr. Courtney and her parents are friends from church with my parents! Dr. Megan is the cousin of the best friend of one of my good friends. God is just sending us angels from everywhere! We even got a special guest visit from Dr. Nancy Pretty Eyes, who was very impressed with Landon's growth.

Speaking of angels, I must interrupt our regularly scheduled program to tell you about the adventures of Ryan and Landon's main primary nurse Kimmy, aka The Other Mother. Since I have gone back to work in the afternoons, Ryan is alone with Landon on Thursday and Friday afternoons. Apparently, this is not very stimulating for him as he has decided to wage a prank war against our wonderful nurse Kimmy! It all started when Kimmy was appointed the official 't-shirt giver outer' of a team she participated in at work. This was a big deal as in past years people didn't receive their t-shirts and anarchy ensued. In order to avoid this, Kimmy had a system of giving out the t-shirts and checking off a person's name once they got theirs. Ryan decided it would be funny to hide the t-shirts throughout the NICU room. I came back from work to find Kimmy frantically looking for the t-shirts and Ryan with a mischievous look on his face. I got Ryan to fess up and Kimmy was already formulating how to get him back.

Unfortunately, Ryan was too fast for her, probably because she is too busy taking care of our baby to wage prank wars! He decided to put a piece of tape on the bottom of her computer mouse so when she went to chart what Landon had been doing that day, her mouse didn't work. Ryan got Landon's neighbor's parents involved in the fun and I once again walked in from work to find the 3 of them snickering as Kimmy contemplated calling engineering to fix her computer. The final blow was when Ryan used a prank phone call app on his phone to call Kimmy and tell her that her credit card had been used to purchase exotic pets in Guatemala. He admitted to doing that one about the time Kimmy started looking for a garbage to puke in out of anxiety of having to work through a credit card fraud nightmare. I was pretty mad at him for that little stunt. However, after getting over the shock, Kimmy wasn't too mad at him and is already thinking of payback...

Alright back to Landon. The last three days have been more of a challenge then usual. He has started a fun new trick of holding his breath until his heartrate drops to the 40s and then drops the oxygen level in his blood to almost nonexistent. The result is a rush of nurses working to make him start breathing again and sometimes even having to resusitate him with an oxygen bag giving him manual breathes like with CPR. This event happens about 4-5 times a day and causes our hearts to race each time. It is usually followed by Landon pooping. We think he is just so uncomfortable from using him lower intestine for the first time that it takes his breath away. Just to be sure this is related to him learning to poop, his doctors are doing some tests. They are testing to see if these episodes may be seizures or if something weird is going on with his heart. There is a very small chance that this is anything other than a pooping issue, but better safe than sorry.