Day 23

Given the events of last evening, I'm wondering if I shouldn't wait until 11:59 PM each night to post the day's news. After posting the good news yesterday, Blaine and I actually took a nap in the afternoon and went out to dinner with Riley last night. When we got seated at the restaurant, I took a look at my phone and saw a call back number with the dreaded 820 prefix of the hospital. So I left the table to go outside and return the call. Sure enough, it was the NICU calling to let us know that the blood culture they sent out as a preventative measure on Friday came back positive. This resulted in an automatic spinal tap. Of all the things that have happened so far, this one struck me as the most surreal. As a parent, to find out that my tiny baby had a spinal tap while I took a nap and had dinner at a restaurant was difficult to bear. The nurse said that the results of the tap and the second blood culture would not be back until this morning, but she was hopeful that the antiobiotics they started as a preventive measure on Friday would have done the trick to help get rid of the infection. Of course, the only thing I could hear in my head was Friday's nurse explaining that they had sent off a blood culture and didn't expect anything to grow, stating "it would be somewhat worse to find that she has an infection throughout her blood than to discover that she has an infection only in her tummy." So....I was hearing that now we had an infection throughout the blood....great. And the infection could possibly lead to spinal meningitis...even greater.
I felt an extreme need to be at the hospital, so after a tense and rather unenjoyable dinner, I dropped Blaine and Riley off at home and headed into the hospital. A different nurse was already on duty when I got there and within 5 minutes, my worst fears were relieved--the spinal tap results were already back and they were negative. Hallelujah! She also put a much more positive spin on the blood culture results, suggesting that the results provided an explanation for her intestinal swelling other than necrotizing entercolitis. Overall, she felt that the news was not too bad and I decided to go with it.
This morning we arrived only to be kicked out for the physician rounds within 5 minutes. She was very alert and was calmly looking around for the short time we were there. We went back after lunch determined to speak to a physician before leaving about the whole infection thing. Blaine got to hold Brynn today and after waking up momentarily upon being picked up, she fell asleep promptly on his chest and didn't move a muscle for the entire hour. We got to speak to Dr. Slack (a neonatologist who has been at St. John's NICU for the past 25 years and is the current head of the NICU) after holding Brynn. She was very reassuring, reporting that the infection was the likely cause of her bowel distension rather than NEC. Although the results are not certain yet, she believes that the infection is likely to be a staph infection. She reported that they plan to continue to avoid feeding her for a minimum of 5 days even though they don't think NEC was the culprit at this point. Clinically, she reported that Brynn looks great which reassures her that the antiobiotic is likely the correct one. We won't see the final results of the next blood culture for another 2 days so we're crossing our fingers that the antiobiotic has cleared things up.
In the weight department, she gained 17 grams today for a total of 1029 grams (still 2 lbs 4 oz). I am hoping that this is really all the news for today, and I hope I have very little to post tomorrow...we're hoping for a boring day with the only news being a nice, big weight gain....all fingers crossed please.