Today Emma officially reached the milestone of 40 weeks gestational age, meaning today is her official due date. So happy Due Day to the big girl! She's growing nicely still. I realize that it has been a while since I last updated this blog, and I apologize to everyone for that. Sometimes you just have to step away for a while. Not only that, but like I mentioned before there just isn't a development every day like there was in the beginning.
Emma is now on the absolute lowest amount of oxygen they can have her on. The next step would be to remove her from it completely. They still don't know when they're going to try that. The reasoning behind that is because they still want her to develop the ability to take 100% of her feeds from a bottle as opposed to anything from the feeding tube. She was doing very well last week, taking everything, or nearly everything for a few days straight. Then she developed thrush, which is a very common infection in all babies, not just preemies. This made it painful for her to eat because there was an infection in her throat. So they treated that and are continuing to treat it still and each day she gets back to taking more and more of her feeds from a bottle. So hopefully she will continue that trend as well.
Once she is taking all of her feeds from a bottle they will contemplate what to do with the oxygen. The main thing they're concerned with right now is the feeding. They're not nearly as concerned about the breathing at this point. As I stated above, she is on the absolute lowest level of oxygen she can get. But some babies have a very hard time coming completely off of it, and they just don't want to push her anymore than they already are.
Another big development for Emma is the fact that she's closing in on 5 pounds. She's not there yet, but she's very close. She was at 4 pounds 12.8 ounces last night when they weighed her close to 11pm. Not being able to eat from a bottle has actually HELPED her gain weight. It seems counter intuitive, but she is not burning any calories eating if she's getting all of it through her feeding tube. They only let her eat from a bottle for 30 minutes each time, and if she hasn't finished her feed by that time they put the rest of it in her feeding tube. The reasoning behind that is she burns more calories than she takes in after that point. So by not taking anything at all from a bottle for a few days, she didn't burn as many calories. And as you all know, the more calories you take in, the more weight you gain.
This whole experience has gone much differently than anyone imagined. Everyone figured Emma would be born now, or sometime around now. Instead she decided she was ready 10 weeks and 1 day early. She's been such a fighter up to this point, growing more and more and just inspiring so many people. Happy Due Day to that beautiful little girl!! There are so many people praying for you Emma. To those of you who have reached out to me recently inquiring as to how she is doing, thank you very much. I am sorry that I haven't kept the blog as updated as I was in the beginning. But know that your words of encouragement and well wishes are well received. Hopefully soon I'll be able to make a very exciting post here. I'm not sure when that's coming, but hopefully soon. I hope y'all have a great night!!
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