Charlotte is one tough little girl! She made it through her surgery on Wednesday. Patrick and I still flinch every time her bare hands go near her nose. I wonder how long it will be before we lose that habit.
Charlotte went a total of 28 hours without eating (8 a.m. the morning of surgery to 12 p.m. the day after surgery). This made for a long night in the hospital trying to comfort her to sleep without being able to offer her any milk. Her first feeds were fed through her brand new G-tube using a pump and she more or less tolerated them. By evening we were back to attempting the bottle first and then bolus feeding the remaining food (using a syringe and gravity).
We were discharged on Friday afternoon and rather than driving straight through to Houghton we stopped at Pat's parents' house in Eau Claire where Charlotte got to meet her great grandparents. Charlotte was pretty smiley with Great Grandma Dorothy.
We were happy to get a picture of 4 generations of Mehls/Russell.
Feeding Charlotte has become a 2-person job. Since leaving the hospital she's begun throwing up more than ever (and she threw up a lot before) and then she is starving by the time her next feed rolls around. Even with her urgent hunger cries she is not quite up to her average of 25% by bottle. While we know she's hungry, her cries cause her body to tense up and make it impossible to bolus the milk into her stomach. We've figured out the most successful way to feed her is for one of us to hold her and comfort her while the other distributes her feed over 30 minutes. We then hold her upright for another 30 minutes and cross our fingers that at least some of her feed stays down. As you can imagine, this is extra fun in the car.
Monday a pump will be delivered that will allow us to focus on holding and comforting her while the milk is pumped into her stomach. Hopefully they come right away in the morning or Patrick will have a stressful day while I'm at work.
We arrived back in Houghton at 7:30 p.m. today and are relieved to be done traveling once again. Charlotte will need to see a GI specialist in Milwaukee, so we'll be traveling periodically over the coming months.
1 comments on "January 9, 2010"
If you'll be traveling quite a bit over the next few months, does that mean that the next time you make a random trip to EC that you'll call - Even if we don't get to meet Char just yet??? :)
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