Another week past - that's all?!

I sat down to write this post thinking that it's been a long time since our last one, but I see now that it's only (?) been a week. Feels like a lot longer.

Eliza is three months old today. Just being able to say that makes me breathe a bit easier. Oliver died at three days old, and Charlotte at three weeks, so I couldn't help but worry as this date approached... you might say I'm being more than a bit superstitious, and you'd be absolutely right. I know it's crazy. But still, three months feels very significant to me.

Last Wednesday, Eliza got moved from the ICN (intensive care nursery) to the TCN (transitional care nursery). This is supposedly a good thing, both as a reflection of how stable and healthy she is (no longer considered critical) and as a big step closer to eventually coming home. We can't help but have mixed feelings about it, though, as TCN does mean she gets less individual attention from the nurses, and the babies are MUCH louder than the ICN babies. Hungry & big babies = lots of noise. Our first impressions were also unfortunately rather negative, as we had a TCN nurse on Thursday and Friday nights who completely failed to chart (i.e., record for future reference) some symptoms that Eliza was developing, even after Heather specifically called attention to them as being unusual for Eliza. By Saturday, she was having a lot of bradies and desats, and after a chest x-ray, it turned out that she was retaining fluid in her lungs again. This is clearing up fine after putting her back on diuretics, but if the TCN nurse had properly recorded things on Thursday and Friday we believe that it could have been caught earlier before it caused her so much stress. So all in all not the best first impression, but at least Eliza has been moved to a quieter corner now and we have had great nurses since the incident.

Since Eliza's been growing so much lately, her eyes have been developing too, and unfortunately we found last week that she had begun to develop significant ROP (retinopathy of prematurity). So on Friday she got laser eye surgery to correct it. It's too early to tell for sure whether that was enough to resolve it, but a follow-up exam this week showed no further degradation, which is a good sign in and of itself. Baby will have enough vision problems just being the child of me (extreme nearsightedness) and Heather (extreme astigmatism), she doesn't need anything else causing her eyes more trouble!

Other exciting events in Eliza's life - they (and we) have started trying to teach her to eat rather than just having all her food pumped down a tube into her stomach. Baby steps so far, just taking tiny amounts of milk from a bottle, but she seems to be doing pretty decently with it so far. It was really funny watching her reaction to Heather trying to burp her after one such feed - she was making faces that clearly said "What the heck is going on here?"

All of the growth and weight gain she's been having have made such a transformation of Eliza's appearance. She's looking like a small baby now instead of like a skinny, wrinkly old man. She's actually got some baby fat now (especially in her cheeks), and her arms and legs are getting chubby instead of being little skin-and-bones sticks. It's so good to see. They've even started letting her wear preemie clothes, although they're still too big for her so it's a pretty comical sight: