Introduction

Our sons Charles George Fitzpatrick and Henry Michael Fitzpatrick were born prematurely on November 16, 2013 at a gestational age of 24 weeks and 1 day. Their "due date" was March 7th, 2014. We started this site on November 28th.

Both Aly and David will be posting to the site. While you will probably be able to tell who is writing by our writing styles, we will sign off on our entries with our initials so you will be sure of the author.

Saturday, April 19, 2014

Moving Closer to the Door

In an example of real life imitating metaphor, Charlie and Henry are moving closer to the door. When Charlie left, we did a bed shuffle where Henry moved to Charlie's old spot. This freed up Henry's location for the son of the nice family that I mentioned in the post the other day. Their boy is going to be there for a while so Aly wanted them to have the "prime NICU real estate" that is Henry's old spot. Henry's new bed is, you will have guessed, closer to the door. Not as close as Charlie's new spot, though, which is literally the bed nearest the door. 

Charlie's eye doctor seems quite pleased with how Charlie's eyes are doing and if the exam on Sunday looks good, he is going to be comfortable with Charlie being seen as an out patient. 

Henry, meanwhile, is on an antibiotic that everyone is confident will take care of the infection. He is getting some extra oxygen through a nasal cannula and we have been told to expect him to need that for a while. So we will get training on using oxygen at home. Henry has bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD), sometimes called chronic lung disease. So does Charlie. It is very common in very premature babies. Unfortunately for Henry, he has had a late regression of his disease that was probably brought on by the infection. The good news is that we are assured that as he grows it will go away and, in a few years, his lungs will be normal. 

So, we didn't quite make the target of both boys home by Easter. Let's see how we do with both home by Mothers' Day (US version). 


(D)

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