Note: we started drafting this post on Saturday the 27th. Things got busy, as the next post will indicate, and we never got a chance to finish and post it. Posting it now for the historical record:
It's been a roller-coaster of a week.
We've been asking the various nurses and doctors for their personal estimations on when the boys will be ready to go home. On Thanksgiving, one nurse guessed it would be a couple more weeks, "but definitely before Christmas". Another guessed a week or two. A key issue was that each of the boys appeared to most of the nurses to have some issues with stamina: they weren't finishing all their feeds, so the nurses were using the feeding tube about once each shift.
Well, Silas got tired of this on Thursday and pulled his feeding tube out on his own. The nurse on duty wasn't in a hurry to replace it, and tried giving him all his feedings from the bottle. It worked. When it came time to change Gabriel's tube (done weekly) later in that shift, she just pulled his out and didn't replace it. Viola! Gabriel started taking his feeds on his own as well.
This all deeply impressed the Nurse Practitioner (who gives most of the medical orders), and on Friday she changed their feeding schedule to "on demand" rather than every three hours. Both the boys started eating more at a feed, allowing them to sleep longer. Now we're talking days, not weeks.
But, it's up and down: Early Saturday morning the nurse called us to say Si had blood in his stool. After consultation with the Neonatologist, they were suspending his feeds...
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