Eliza update

So far, two of the ideas about what's happening with Eliza have turned out to be significant, and we've ruled out two others. Still waiting on the rest.

Things we've confirmed:

1. Getting tired out / frustrated by needing to feed so much - problems with the bottle nipple?

We tried a slower-flow nipple but that didn't seem to help much. We had a meeting with a different speech therapist (baby feeding is covered by both speech therapy and occupational therapy teams, which is a bit odd), and she suggested that we actually try a faster nipple instead, as it seemed like Eliza was having to do a lot of sucking just to get one mouthful of milk to swallow. So now we're using the "level 2" nipples and that seems to be helping a lot - she's taking more food at each feed, more quickly. Yay! We just have to be careful to not overwhelm her with too much milk when she's first starting each meal.

She's maxing out now at about 60 mL (2 oz) per feeding, and is eating about 7-8 times a day (every 2-3 hours during the day and every 3-4 hours at night). It's a lot more food than she used to eat - we're glad!

2. Urinary tract infection.

Yup. We got confirmation of this yesterday afternoon. All we know at this point is that it's gram-negative rods again (sound familiar?), and we're still waiting for identification of the specific species, but that's enough info to start her on antibiotics. Mixed feelings here - we're not glad that she has an infection again, but we are glad to at least have an explanation for why she hasn't been acting herself lately, and now we can do something about it. Treating this will probably delay her discharge, but we're not sure for how long.


Things we've ruled out:

3. Ear infection - her ears have lots of wax but do not look inflamed.

4. Thyroid dysfunction - her test results came back normal. Whew.


Still uncertain:

5. Intolerance of fortifiers. She's still on plain breast milk for now; they may try yet another different additive tomorrow if she eats well enough today. This one is thoroughly pre-broken down so it's supposed to be really easy to digest.

6. Reflux. She is still having problems with this even now that she's been on the Prilosec for a couple days - we're not sure if the switch really made any difference.