June 12

Things are pretty quiet for the time being.  The goal now is to have Ryan rest, eat, and grow.  Eventually, we will have to address his lungs - which continue to be in pretty bad shape.  The steroids did help, a little - now they need to grow.  We may need to consider another round of steroids, and hopefully since his duct should no longer be an issue, they may work even better (obviously it'd be better if we didn't need them at all). It's also a goal to get him extubated and breathing with the byphasic or CPAP machine... this is a pretty tall order because his ventilation settings are still pretty high. There are other babies the same age or younger who are on those machines, I guess their lungs are in better shape. I was chatting with his nurses and they said he has what they call "White boy syndrome". I guess in their years of experience, they find that these poor lil' white boys are the ones who take the longest to get better.  They said that African American and East Indian babies do the best, and the very toughest are the African American girls.  (This has not been proven fact - merely an observation from some the nursing staff that I thought was interesting).  Unfortunately our baby boy is the whitest white boy - it's his blond hair that's holding him back ;). 

While I was holding Ryan today, Nancy asked me how his ribs are doing.... I didn't know there was anything wrong with his ribs. Apparently in his discharge summary, they'd recorded that he had 2 fractured ribs after his surgery. HUH??!!  The surgeon told us the surgery was fine - I'd assume if there were fractured ribs, he might mention that.  Ryan's doctor came over pretty quickly after Nancy told her I hadn't been informed- she said it's common after the duct surgery because that's how they get to the duct - through the ribs.  We'd been told that, but nothing mentioned about breaking ribs.  I took the news surprisingly well but felt a little unsettled after I got home so gave the hospital a call - the discharge doctor called me back pretty quickly and said that one xray was reported to show fractures, the next one didn't mention fractures.  They're going to look into it and get back to me tomorrow.  The bottom line is that Ryan is ok - doesn't seem to be in any extra pain, and handled our cuddle very well today.  If the ribs were in fact cracked, there's nothing they can do - these babies (as we know) are super resilient, and apparently very bendy. It'd be nice to know the true story though.

Breaking news: Just got an email from Karen (our 3rd primary nurse).  She spoke with one of the docs who said that they don't have to disclose the broken ribs. "it happens with ligation'.  So weird, since this whole experience seems to be all about full disclosure and giving us worse case scenarios.  Oh well.  At least he's not suffering.