Lucas Camilo

The last 2 days have seen very gradual but marked improvement by Lucas. He continues to make more spontaneous movements of his arms and legs, is taking more frequent, steady breaths over the ventilator, and has started occasionally sucking on fingers. The fact that he’s making the sucking motion has been noted as positive by the doctors, and so we’ve even had him working on a pacifier occasionally for practice (though once this is all over we’ll hide that sucker away and put on his “we will not be pacified!” onesie). He still sleeps about 95% of the time which supposedly is par for the course in preemies but can be frustrating for us since its just so much fun to see him with his eyes open. We’re trying not to become overbearing parents before he’s even a month old, so we told him that its ok to rest often and take his time getting better.

Lucas’s jaundice appears to have mostly subsided, and he’s been off the photo-therapy for a number of days. But he’s not totally out of the woods: though his overall bilirubin level is way down from a week and a half ago, and the indirect differential is also down, the direct bilirubin differential has increased over the past couple days (?!?). The neonatologist who’s taken over Lucas’s care (Dr. Stone) has used this somewhat complicated twist to test the residents during their daily rounds, and it took them a while to figure out that this could mean that something’s up with his liver or urinary tract. So they took blood for some tests yesterday and did an ultrasound of his midsection. After all the clinical mumbo-jumbo it seems most likely he’s just a little constipated (he hasn’t pooped for a couple days) so they give him a baby-suppository and hopefully that will get things moving and bring that darned direct differential down!

In the meantime, Lucas has become the most popular baby in the NICU. We barely got to hang out with him alone yesterday as there was a steady stream of visitors throughout the day: Sara W-K, Nina Randolph, Karla and Lita, Catherine, Sha and Julie… We told him that we’re going to have to get him his own Slingshot daily planner if this continues! His blog is also getting hundreds of hits a day and quite honestly we’ve been overwhelmed and humbled by the amount of interest and energy that everyone has generated towards Lucas.