5 Sept - 3 weeks old: seeing, holding, haemorrhaging, believing

Sam's spot in NICU at night

Sammy is three weeks old today!

In premature celebration of this milestone I got a call yesterday from Bernadette in NICU telling me to come with a camera as Mich was holding Sam. What! I raced the well worn track between home and hospital in record time to find the remarkable sight of Mich with Sam’s bed on her lap and him perched proudly on top, firmly connected to all his pipes. The sight was doubly good in that he had been moved from the ventilator to CPAP. Time stood still in the NICU for a precious twenty minutes as we sat there with him. Then reality broke in on our elation as he began to desaturate. And soon we were back into full resuscitation mode with four medical staff ambubagging him back to life and back to full ventilation while we stood at a distance watching red flashing monitors . A microcosm half hour of what life has been like for the past month.

Today he opened his eyes for the first time. Sadly it was to eyeball his doc but I guess he is keeping him alive so he deserves it. He has been very restless today so he got his first taste of Morphine. Paul had to resort to putting a line in the side of his head with the last few veins in his legs and arms having disintegrated - I imagine I would be a bit unhappy with that too. The opiate totally zonks him out with little movement and very few self-initiated breaths. This is balanced by the resumption of feeding him Mich’s expressed breastmilk (lovingly pumped every three hours throughout the day and night) which his gut appears to be accepting.

A further major disappointment today was watching a brain scan reveal a grade 1 haemorrhage in his right ventricle. Paul, as ever, remained upbeat and explained that this would probably have happened much earlier and was only now showing up because it was healing…and that it was only likely to reduce his IQ from 145 to about 130. So in a way we are grateful that it is only a grade 1 (grade 4 is the worst) bleed and that there is no evidence of hydrocephalus or blocked ventricles, but the brain remains the key organ in the whole equation and for everyone is the most complex to understand. A quick Google search revealed something which helped us http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/medical_notes/a-b/1746704.stm

Paul remains most concerned about the lungs and his seeming reluctance to want to breathe on his own in the wake of getting over the recent infection. So more shots of dexamethasone (a steroid to kickstart the lungs) and powerful prayers is the order of the day (and night).

I know there are so many of you out there praying and willing our little man along and at the risk of repeating myself I’ll say again on my and Mich’s behalf that we are indebted to you for the blessing of three weeks with our boy and sustaining us to keep at it. In gratitude I’ve created this weblog for Sam where I hope to provide more frequent updates than the mails.

The mails will continue too at significant points which, right now, are coming thick and fast.

With love

Terence