Wednesday, 2/16

It feels like there's a lot to report tonight! Dinky's bilirubin is down so he's off the phototherapy and has his little eye patches off! I hope it stays down, sometimes it rebounds. Martin and I could not take our eyes off of him. Now that we can see his whole face for an extended period of time we have just fallen in love with him all over again. He really is just the cutest thing. He seems to favor Martin quite a bit. He struggles to open his eyes (I'm sure it's hard when you've had a blindfold on for over a week) and his little forehead just crinkles up. He really is just adorable (and of course I'm not biased).

The other major thing is they have decided to treat his PDA. I haven't really mentioned that on here because we didn't know if it would be a problem. This morning they did a chest xray and his heart was a little enlarged so they have decided to treat it. Here's what it is:
Patent ductus arteriosus (PDA)
A PDA is small blood vessel within the heart that fails to close after birth. Premature infants are at greatest risk of PDA. Babies with PDA are treated with a medication called Indomethacin to try to close the vessel. If medication attempts do not close the PDA, surgery may be required to “tie off” the vessel. This surgery is called a PDA ligation.
They started the medicine today. He will get three doses, once every 12 hours. The sad part of that is he can't eat while having the medicine or for 48 hours afterwards. That makes us so sad because they had just increased his feedings to 6 mL and we could really tell his belly was starting to fill out. Hopefully he will jump right back to that point when they can feed him again.