Having now got the hang of how the neonatal unit roller-coaster works,  we’re trying our darndest not to get carried away with excitement at the progress SJ’s made this week. We’re all too aware how fragile she remains, just how close the quiet room is from her icu bed and just how quickly we can end up in there being brought crashing back down by one of the docs. 

That said, it’s been a pretty good week. We’ve been almost completely ignored by all of the doctors all week long, other than to say hello to in the corridors, which we’re taking as their unspoken way of giving us a quiet, yet cautious thumbs up.

Here’s what’s happened this week…… It started last weekend with one of Savannah’s fave nurses looking after her for a couple of days. Good nurses are like good personal trainers, you see. They know just how much to push their client/baby to get the very best out of them without causing them a mischief. And that’s exactly what happened last weekend with some encouraging nursing seeing SJ’s o2 requirement creeping down everso slightly. And then, SJ’s dealt another trump card with back-to-back top nurses, this time with Aunty Dawn looking after her for two days (the very first nurse SJ met when she arrived in icu and the one who suggested we should call her Sam, hence being my fave too). The thing with Aunty D is that she doesn’t take any nonsense from her babies….it’s a kind of “no funny business on my shift kid” thing she has going and it works! So with the stern encouragement of Aunty D, SJ’s o2 came down a couple more notches again, her weight went up and she started to look pretty good on it!

So come Wednesday morning after her 4 day boot camp, SJ was in a pretty good place with her oxygen requirement having come down a fair way. With this, the docs seized the opportunity to whip her cpap machine out from underneath her and replace it with just a bit of oxygen up her nose without all the breathing help she was prevously getting. No more cpap meant, no more face mask and our first real opportunity to see SJ’s face.

Not content with throwing off her cpap mask,  in our best week of progress so far, Savannah’s also passed the 2kg mark, been allowed to start wearing clothes, begun her first forays into breast feeding and also thrown off the top of her incubator to convert it into an open cot.  And all this in a month that the docs told us not to expect too much progress!

So we’re trying hard not to get too excited by all these developments but we’re feeling cautiously optimistic that there may well be a glimmer of light beginning to flicker on at the end of the tunnel.

And here’s the week in pictures: