Sunday, February 8

Caden started on bolus feeds yesterday. This just means that instead of receiving a continuous drip feeding through his tube, he now gets feedings every two hours for about 30 minutes at a time. This will help him get on a better feeding pattern and will help him transition to bottle feeds. They haven't weighed him since he had surgery so we have no idea how much he weighs right now. They said they're not as worried about it in CVICU as they are in NICU so they don't typically weigh the babies. But they are really wanting him to put on weight, so they are adding a small amount of formula to the breast milk he is receiving in order to add more calories. They are doing this instead of simply giving him a larger volume of breast milk because they only want him to have a certain amount of fluid input during the day and this is the easiest way to accomplish that.

They also adjusted his oxygen rate up to 100% and lowered his rate from 1 liter to .25 liter. They said wth the nasal cannula, if they're at 100% oxygen, they are really only getting about 30-40% through the tube. And, 21% is room oxygen level. So, they are working toward weaning him off it soon, maybe tomorrow, depending on how things go. Last night they tested him to see how he would handle taking it off completely and his oxygen saturation dropped right away. Not a huge drop, but enough of one that they didn't want him staying at that level.

Caden's voice still isn't back. We talked to one of the cardiologists last night and he said it is very likely that he is experiencing vocal cord paralysis. I guess this is very common with coarc repairs because the nerve associated with the vocal cords runs right through the area where they do the repair and it often gets stretched or nicked, causing paralysis. He said most of the time this is temporary and the voice will come back, but it can take up to several weeks, it all just depends on the child. And we know Caden takes things at his own pace.