Peter in the Hospital

There have been a lot of good questions about Peter that we have been asked that I felt need a longer forum than facebook to answer.

Peter was born at what we thought was 23 weeks. I had two sonogram to date the pregnancy at the very beginning because of my PCOS (poly cystic ovarian syndrome) because my cycle was very irregular. It is very unlikely that these scans at 6 and 7 weeks could be very off, but Peter was born looking two weeks older. This increased his chances of survival significantly. He was 1 lb 9 oz and about 13 inches long. He had to be resuscitated immediately after birth and place in the neonatal unit.

There Peter now has a ventilator which is a tube going down his throat that forces his lungs to breathe. This at minimal levels. He has a tube down his nose into his stomach that they use to feed him beast milk every hour with a syringes. He has an IV in his hand that they can use to give him blood transfusions or medication. He has a line into a vein in his umbilical cord that is also for blood transfusions or medication if needed. He also has a line into an artery in his umbilical card for taking blood samples so that they don't have to prick him all the time. From this is also a monitor for keeping an eye on his heart rate and blood pressure. He then has a monitor strapped to one feet for monitoring his temperature and a monitor on his other foot that checks his oxygen levels. These monitors on his feet are switched every six hours to keep them from bruising him. He is in an incubator that is kept very warm and has high humidity to keep his skin moist. This is also why they do not have clothes on him at this time. Our skin tends to be 12 cells thick, but his skin was only about one cell thick because he was so young. This means he could loose a lot of water through his skin if they are not careful. Also his skin is very delicate and so they treat him very carefully. He should develop normal skin thickness within a couple of weeks. At that time his skin color will not be so red and plastic looking.

All of this seems like a lot, but for Peter's gestational age, he is doing very well and is very stable. They are often testing his blood and checking everything possible because preemies are in high risk of infections and they want to catch any sign of it as early as possible. Even though he he is doing very well, he is not expected to go home until close to his original due date. This is because there is just a lot of growing he must do. For instance, they are having to tweak various things for him. One day they had to give him just a little bit of insulin, another day they put him under a light for jaundice. Sometimes they give him just a little bit of blood to help his hemoglobin levels which tend to go down with all the blood they take for test. These little adjustments will probably continue for a while.

They tried to take his ventilator out and put him on a CPAP (air blown into the nose) about two days after he was born but his brain would not tell him to breathe often enough. They put him back on the ventilator for a little while and intend to try again in a couple of days. This is OK because they needed to see how much they could push him and make him exercise his lungs. He maybe on and off the ventilator periodically until he his strong enough to stay off.

For food, he was first given a liquid through his umbilical cord that had amino acids and nutrients, but they are slowly weening him off of that and progressively giving him more breast milk. Breast milk is the easiest thing for his stomach to digest and it gives him a lot of help with his developing immunity system. He has been doing very well with this and is having plenty of wet diapers. They change his diaper once every six hours so they do not have to mess with his sensitive skin. They are just now waiting for him to have a bowel movement, but it may wait until he is taking in more milk.

I wanted to do research on the issues preemies deal with, but these issue vary greatly and can be discouraging as a statistic. Peter is doing very well and has been really blessed by God with very few of the problems that preemies can deal with. He is still very delicate and we are told to expect good and bad days. Even so, with prayer and patience, we feel that he will continue to do well. Thank you all for your love and concern. Please continue to pray for him. He is my strong little man, but he also has a long journey to travel.