And you thought poop was important!

When you become a parent the first thing you become a master of is poop. You know all the different kinds, what they mean, how to make them different colors by feeding your kid different things, and how to wash it out of anything it comes in contact with. And you count the poops. Yep, you count them like you were a little kid counting the big silver quarters in your piggie bank. Constipated babies are not fun people to be around. And babies with diarrhea can quickly become dangerously dehydrated. So poop becomes VERY important to all parents. You find yourselves having serious conversations about poop.

Well, now we are counting pee pee diapers like they are liquid gold. Evan is struggling to produce urine. We are pretty sure that it's because we slowed his continuous feed pump to 20mls per hour due to the fact that his body can't handle more than that. The normal rate is about 27mls to 30mls per hour. I'm also trying to regularly remind the clever doctors that they let him go for 14 hours without eating which would screw up his system too.

Last night his vomiting that shouldn't have happened actually happened because he can't digest this much food fast enough and so it all came back out the stomach with his bile. It was very painful for him and scared the freaking crap out of me.

We did an xray and the tube is placed correctly. He is on yet another IV drip with sugar for calories to supplement what he's missing in the continuous feed pump. We may need to move to adding TPN in his IV as well. They told us if he has another vomiting episode on 20mls/hr then we will need to do an MRI (which for an infant requires sedation again) to see if there is something wrong neurologically with him. They do not think this stems from the Level 1 hematoma/brain bleed they found during a standard NICU head ultrasound. That one was so small and insignificant the neonatologists almost missed it and argued over whether to call it a brain bleed. (For those of you who don't know, brain bleeds can be pretty common in preemies and are categorized as Levels 1 through 4, with Level 1 being usually pretty tiny and heal quickly on their own with no issues.)

Cameron is also still having vomit issues but not nearly as bad or as often as Evan. We have been approved to transfer to Mt. Washington Peds Hospital but Evan is not considered medically stable for transfer yet, and Cameron is borderline because they upped his meds and added something called Karrafate (sp??) which is supposed to work like Milk of Magnesia after he's eaten. So far it's just made him gag and throw up. And since the new hospital doesn't take admissions on the weekends we will have to wait until Monday at the earliest to transfer.

We are still trying to work out the transition on that one as each baby is transferred via ambulance separately which doesn't make me happy but apparently there's rules about this kind of thing. And since Cameron is borderline they have agreed not to split us up between the two hospitals, at least not yet. If Evan's situation turns out to be worse then we will be split between the two hospitals.

So far last night was the best night yet, with Cameron only spitting up a tiny bit and Evan not at all.