Week 9 in the Big Hosptial House and the contestants are getting restless!  They promised us a boring month whilst Savannah concentrates on growing and thankfully that’s exactly what she’s giving us right now.

We’ve seen a host of babies come and go in these past 8 weeks in icu and tragic as it was to see a baby loose her fight last week,  all of the others have graduated to lower intensity rooms, wards,  local hospitals and some even home so we remain as optimistic as ever that the odds are in Savannah’s favour, despite her being ic3’s longest staying resident.  In fact,  she’s so settled in here that one of the nurses referred to her as the Queen of ic3 yesterday. So whilst everyone else around us is upgrading or checking out, Savannah,  much like the Major in Fawlty Towers, has become quite the long term resident! She’s also becoming quite institutionalised and now knows when her two hourly feeds are due and starts looking around for her chow if not delivered to her bang on time.

In between the slow growing process,  SJ has also been delivering on the teeny tiny steps of progress we were hoping to see too.  On Thursday she was switched from bipap to cpap, which in layman terms means a little less support than before on her breathing.  Her oxygen requirement,  which we’ve become somewhat obsessed with,  was steadfastly refusing to come down from the 50s & 60s% but at least had not gone up any further when she switched to cpap. And then today a tiny glimmer of progress with averages this afternoon in the high 40s, numbers we haven’t seen in a few weeks now,  since the steroids wore off.  Fingers crossed this wasn’t a freak afternoon and is the beginnings of a trend in her o2 requirement coming down.  Significantly,  SJ was also putting in a pretty impressively settled performance laying on her back all afternoon,  a position she wouldn’t tolerate for more than a few minutes not so long ago.

So whilst these small steps of progress are barely visible to the human eye,  to us,  they’re enough to keep us going and optimistic.

And here’s a few pics of the Queen of Ic3 in her royal box. …