Christmas Day

Dear Samuel,

Not much news to report today.....which are days that we like.

The only real news from today was that, yet another IV had to come out. The good news is, that you only have 24 hours left to have one in anyways (Antibiotics need to run their course, even though the infection is gone). As I'm typing, you do NOT have anything poking you! They are going to try again at 2:00 a.m. and if they are unsuccessful with placing the IV, they may forego putting one in.

Otherwise, your mom and I came down twice to see you today and did a little photoshoot.

To all of the readers of Sammy's blog.....Merry Christmas from the Parr's! (Hopefully this counts as our Christmas cards. We sort of got sidetracked this year and didn't get to send any out this year).

You keep impressing us AND the NICU staff, buddy. This is going to be our first and last Christmas in the hospital. Your mom and I can't wait until next year already.

Love,
Mom and Dad

The Honeymoon's Over

Dear Samuel,

They told us this would happen.......

2 steps forward, 1 step back. We didn't want to believe them but in the back of our minds we sort of knew it would come.

Luckily, it's nothing "serious" although it can get a little frustrating. The past few days now your O2 saturation drops for no apparent reason especially while laying on your back. I guess this is not an uncommon stage with Premies with the O2 sats dropping and their oxygen intake on their vent going up (You are up to 60% oxygen....when you were first born you were at 21%). While it's good to know this isn't uncommon, it still doesn't make it any easier when your alarms go off every few minutes......

As far as we know, your infection is still there as well. The blood culture that was done on Wednesday was "clean" today, but so was the one from Monday at 24 hours of being cultured. It's once we hit the 48 hour mark is when it comes back positive. They have started treating this infection more aggressively by upping your antibiotics.

We still are chasing your blood sugars all over the map. Tonight's reading was 237 (They want it to be around 100). They have upped your insulin again to try and regulate it.

There was some GOOD to today though....

You did open your left eye just a bit today. It's about halfway "unfused". My guess is that you will have it fully open tomorrow morning when we come and see you. We can't wait to see both of them open!

We are all in for a long haul buddy.....but I think we have a pretty good thing going. You keep fighting and so will we.

See you tomorrow pal.

Love,
Mom and Dad