He's Hanging In There

Coen was officially three days old this morning. He's had a little bit of a rough time. After my last post, Coen's doctor decided that after doing a needle aspiration it was clear that his lungs were not just being affected by the pneumothorax, and so overnight they intubated him and gave him a dose of surfactant to help get his lungs inflating properly. Luckily they were able to extubate him shortly after.  He improved quickly but by the next morning he had a huge pneumothorax on the opposite side. They showed me his x-rays and the pocket of air was so big his lung was almost completely deflated and his heart was even being shoved over into the other side of his chest.

So Coen's now the proud (temporary) owner of a chest tube. Luckily the needle aspiration worked on the other side, so he doesn't have a tube in each side. Since that was inserted, he's really improved and they were able to take him off C-PAP and switch him to a high flow nasal canula. He's straddling the line at this point...the C-PAP was too damaging to his lungs but his blood gases haven't been great with the canula, so we'll see what happens. Until he gets this chest tube out no cuddling is allowed, and I'm dying to hold him.

The good news is that he's getting very small amounts of breast milk every three hours and his very rapid breathing (over a hundred breaths a minute at one point) has slowed down markedly.

Baby steps.

The plus to getting off the C-PAP is that they took off a hat that was helping keep it in place and I finally got to see his hair! I have no clue who he looks like at this point. His face is still quite swollen and he's been in some pain from the chest tube so I don't think he really looks like himself yet. But I was able to take some great pictures in the dark last night (Thank goodness for fast 50mm lesnses!), so here are some of the boy.