The revised plan had us offering Max the bottle three times a day for no more than 20 or 30 minutes. (In contrast to the 120 minute Wagnerian dramas that had prevailed.) Anything he didn't take by bottle we'd make up by pumping more, either during the day or at night. The new thinking was that Max needed to gain weight first, while maintaining bottle feeding as an interesting hobby.
Of course, now we're obsessively tracking Max's daily performance because we have to. The new plan requires us to add up his total intake during the day, subtract this figure from 788 ccs (his totaly required daily intake) and divide by 13.5 hours, the amount of time he's on the continuous nighttime feeds. Here's page from the journal:
Here is a graph showing how much he's taking by bottle (in blue) and how much we have to pump into him (in red) since the new plan went into effect. Note the weekend effect--our friend D. ("the baby whisperer") has an uncanny ability to get Max to take bottles.
I look at this picture and I see an insurmountable mountain of red. (Sort of like my personal finances.) And the GI team and speech therapists are saying that we're coming to the end of the period when we can reasonably keep Max on an ng tube. They're warming us up for a straight g-tube, i.e. a tube through his abdominal wall. Some GI specialists also think that such surgery, because it deranges the normal geometry of the stomach (including the infamous Angle of Hiss), must be accompanied by a Nissen fundoplication. And that is a kind of surgery I consider one step removed from mutilation. I'd like to avoid it if at all possible.
But there's another way of looking at Max's progress in bottle feeding. Is this an exercise in lying to myself with statistics? Or am I being a canny value investor? Hard to say right now, but I look at this picture and I think that Max, who has cheated so many other surgeons, is on track to pull off another flabbergasting performance.
