Let’s start with something positive today.  SJ’s weight has tipped the 900g mark for the first time and despite the hellish few days she’s been putting us through, somehow in the midst of all this she still seems to have a good appetite and gained a few grams…yippeee. . Small, but important,  steps.

At the time of writing,  she’s the most settled she’s been in days and is peacefully cracking on with breathing via her ventilator and not making a fuss about anything. I’d love to be able to say this is because she’s such an impeccably well behaved little girl and is doing exactly as told but the reality is actually that she’s been given a concoction of drugs “strong enough to knock out an elephant” (these were Dr Chris’s actual words!). The side effects of the drugs are that as well as paralysing her and keeping her settled and stable,  they also have a knock on effect on her insides and general progress, all of which slows down too.

Poor little Savannah’s been through the mill these last few days, trying to fight off an infection,  dealing with being anemic and most lately accidentally becoming extubated (where her breathing tube came out) and needing to be re-intubated, yet again. Her oxygen saturation levels have been dropping continually all day and taking her longer and longer to recover from and her insesent wriggling and pulling at her tubes has been causing all sorts of problems for the doctors and nurses,  who’ve been at her bedside all day.

All got a bit too much for us today and the look of worry on our faces resulted in us once again being sent to the naughty, sorry, the quiet room, for a chat with the consultant.  The chat went along the lines of “I told you there’d be bad days and this is one of them so soak it up”. Thankfully his excellent bedside manner phrased it a bit more tactfully than this, but we got the gist.  Even more thankfully,  it wasn’t long after this chat that Roz went off to express again and missed the most heart stopping of dramas SJ has laid on for us thus far. Refusing point blank to get her O2 levels back up to where they should be even with being “bagged” and given 100% oxygen. With the doc barking down the phone at radiographers to drop whatever
DIY and rugby incidents they were dealing with in A&E and haul arse to get up here and take an x-ray of SJ asap, it was at this point that more than mild panic began to take over. Ever since the birth had gone relatively smoothly, all of my worrying had been about all sorts of “what ifs” and potential future problems. All of a sudden, I realised we were facing a much more immediate problem and for the very first time I began to deal with the realisation that not all premature babies make it and SJ suddenly seemed to be leaning on the wrong side of the success story statistics for the first time.

Strangely enough,  although it was only a few hours ago now,  I actually can’t recall the sequence of events that followed and how the doctor and nurses managed to stabilise SJ but somehow they did and by the time Roz came back from expressing,  I managed to muster up my best “everything’s fine,  there’s nothing to see here” face.  And so,  lots more drugs and a new tube later and Savannah is more settled (largely due to having been rendered completely paralysed) and breathing better than she has been in 3 days.

Not much more change throughout the rest of the afternoon and evening and as we head off to bed she’s still settled, having her morphine reduced and hasn’t had a desat in 6 hours,  which is a big improvement on the constant back to back desat bouts of the last few days.

So,  I wish there was better news to report but we’re optimistic this will come tomorrow once the antibiotocs have had a good day and a half to begin working. 

In the meantime,  here’s a little pic of Savannah with her little nose plaster finally removed. Such a cute face under all those plasters.