What’s new with Mary Cate?

I want to first start out with an apology for the oh so unoriginal title for this post. I have literally been sitting here for the last 20 minutes trying to come up with something either clever or funny and I am tapped out. So to you all who deserve so much more than the hallmark greeting I gave as the title, please accept my humble apologies and know that I know that I must do better and I will do better.

Now onto Mary Cate. The first thing that I would like to report is Mar Cate’s weight. She is 3 lbs 5 oz (or 1592 grams). This is a huge step for us in the NICU because it means she is eating more food. Notice I said food and not Moms breast milk. This is a little bit of a sore subject so I will cover very quickly hoping that when my wife reads it she will just black it out and not remember. Mary Cate is actually eating formula (the dreaded F word). It is a special kind of formula that helps her digest better and it is as good as advertised. She has gone from eating 6-8cc when I posted last time all the way up to 18cc today (which is 2.5 times more). For those scoring at home this is like me going from my normal 12 oz steak at Outback all the way up to 30 oz, so it was a significant jump in her feedings. With this jump in feeding comes more responsibility and a huge move to the big girl side of the NICU. So we are now one step closer to the door both literally and figuratively.

The down side to the increased feeds is that Mary Cate has more reflux. This isn’t usually such a huge deal but when she refluxes (which is often) her breathing and her O2 stats drop. With this drop in her stats she forgets to tell her heart to beat (which I think we can all agree is a very important for the heart to do). No one panic the nurses are always right here to give her O2 and everything goes back to normal. We are hoping and praying that the reflux will go away because I (Dr Mustaine) believe that if the reflux would get under control than we could take her off the O2 machine. Which would be great. So that is update on Mary Cate hope you enjoyed and please keep the prayers coming. By the way anyone interested in the update for Jamison Setsma his web page is now setup at www.JTsetsma.blogspot.com

Thanks again for all you do.