Evening Update (Thursday 12/18)

Max had a lot of visitors today. Carolyn and her parents dropped by, as did Kerry. By all accounts he put on quite a performance of cuteness. By the time I got to the NICU about an hour or so later, Max was completely pooped. I held him for just less than an hour until the nurses kicked me out at 7:15 or so. It turns out that the 7:00 to 7:45 shift change is closed door to protect the privacy of patients. (Or so I was told.) When I saw Max he was just finishing a feed and doing extremely well. He's still on a nasal cannula but it is just blowing room air up his nose. I couldn't believe it: his oxygen saturation was so good that I thought he must have been on supplemental oxygen. He had one brief brady while I was holding him but it was all over before I knew what was happening.

In a brief conversation, Dr. M. was surprisingly upbeat about Max's lungs. Yes, according to Dr. M., quite possibly Max has chronic lung disease, which sounds really scary even though I haven't googled it yet. (If you ever want a good scare, type some symptoms into google.) However, Dr. M. assured me that the lung grows until age 2, so that the infant grows out of chronic lung disease. That's by far the most optimistic thing he's said in the two months I've known him.

And if the lung grows until age 2, that means Felix's lungs just quit growing. He went in for his routine peds physical this morning. We learnt that he is very heavy for his age, and very, very, very tall. Mysteriously, he decided to start speaking in simple sentences just before his appointment. By the time I got home he had worked his way up to "I want more yogurt".

(Administrative note: For technical reasons, the head circumference graph won't be updated until Sunday. So far all quiet on the northern front.)