Belle appears to be doing well today. She's a bit swollen from the PDA meds but she's being a trooper so far. She's weighing in at 770 grams. Mind you, some of that is water retention, a side effect from the medication she's receiving.
Sometime today they are going to take her off the high-frequency ventilator and put her back on the intermittent pressure mask (NIPPV). She will be back to fully breathing on her own. For such a tiny girl she's got great lungs. The idea is to keep her off the vent as much as possible. The longer that babies stay on the vent, the more chance for lung damage.
Now the real test will be seeing if she can keep her heart rate stable. Hopefully her PDA has shrunk enough so it doesn't cause her to "spell" like she previously did.
Apparently the echo results still show a rather large PDA. For some reason we just can't get over this hump. It may just take some time to finally resolve. Perhaps they will give her another round of treatment in the near future. We'll wait and see.
Kiera and I will be back to visit Arabella later on tonight to see how she's doing as she goes back on the NIPPV mask. I suppose they'll be putting on her hat once again!
We haven't had skin-to-skin time with Belle for a while since she's been going through so much this week. So we've been talking to her a lot more and "hand hugging" her. It's a new term we learned at our "interacting with baby" class 😃
Oh, and the tiny cloth triangles you see in some of the pictures are 'scent cloths' that Kiera and I hold onto our skin (for about 20 minutes) and then place inside the incubator so that Belle can be comforted by our smell and recognize mom and dad.
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