Yesterday Andy was able to hold Amirah for the first time. Because she is on the ventilator still only one of us is able to hold her a day. It takes about 15-20 minutes to set up the ventilator on the person that is holding her. I will get to hold her today :. I'm sure Andy will write about how he was feeling at some point.
The type of hold we will do with her right now is called "Kangaroo-ing". Basically this is just close holding, and having skin to skin contact between the parent and the baby.
The nurse and a respiratory doctor are at the incubator to help transfer the baby and all her tubes to the waiting chest of the parent. The place the baby on the chest and into the hands. Then cover the baby with a blanket. And the whole time they are making sure the vent tubes are staying in place and that Amirah is still sat-ing at a good level. The tape the breathing tubes to the Andy and then once she is settled they let us sit there with her.
I can't speak for Andy, but for me it was almost overwhelming to see him sitting there holding our daughter. It seemed harder to leave her yesterday and I think it was because it some how became more real that she is baby... not just this little person we go to visit.
I don't know if I mentioned this before but the nurses are beginning to encourage us to interact more with Amirah. Soon we will begin to change diapers, and hopefully in a few weeks we can start to feed her, either with a bottle or breastfeed. Right now she isn't able to be feed that way because before 34 weeks babies don't have the suckle/swallow/breath ability.
As for Amirah, she is doing pretty good. Her lungs are still really wet. They have decided to give her a 3 day treatment of Laysics and they started that yesterday. They also stopped giving her the Abuteral and started her on Xoponex. The Abuteral has a side effect of speeding up her heart rate and the Xoponex doesn't do that. So over the next few day's we really hope to see her lungs doing much better.
She is still eating well and growing bigger. Last night she weighed 1000 grams! And she is really starting to fill out more. Her hair is growing and her eyelashes have started to come in. It's just amazing to observe this whole process. We feel extremely blessed for all the love, support and prayer our family gets. Please keep them coming... and especially pray that Amirahs lungs really start to get strong and clear so she can come of the Ventilator soon. Thank you thank you thank you!
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