Lucas Camilo

Para los que leen las noticias de Lucas en español, pueden ver la nota mas reciente el dia 7 de octubre, o haciendo click aqui.

Following his tracheostomy surgery, Lucas was in some pain as the hole in his neck started healing.  It was hard to watch him grimacing whenever his head was moved, and eventually he got another couple small doses of morphine to help with the pain.  That made him pretty sleepy for most of the day yesterday, and he looked a little roughed up too as his face was swollen from the extra fluids he got during surgery.

Today Lucas is feeling a lot better and getting back to his usual wiggling.  The best news is that he’s back to full breast milk feeds after about a week of getting mostly IV fluid and hardly any milk (because of the infection and then the pre and post-surgery fast.)  Given that the hospital has now cut Krista off from leaving any more milk in the giant, deep freezer, and that we’re already doing a job filling both our own freezer and the one in the garage with her milk, this is really good news!  Mostly it’s good news for Lucas since more milk means more growth, more strength, and more wiggling.

Meanwhile, we’re starting to get to know Lucas’s new accessories, especially his trach (pronounced “trake”), which is essentially a small, hard-plastic thing that goes into his trachea.  In a future post we’ll explain more how it works and what our upkeep will look like once we’re home, but we’re not pros yet; we’ll get trained next week in how it works and how to care for it.  We are excited about the fact that it’s a much more stable airway than the ET tube, meaning that it will be easier to hold and play with Lucas… but not quite yet.  Unfortunately it takes a week for the stoma (the name for hole that the trach fits into) to heal, which means that we can’t hold him for now.

It was a nervous week for us as we prepared for surgery, so we’ve felt extra lucky to be surrounded by many of our favorite nurses and respiratory techs.  A lot of people are getting to know Lucas around the hospital, and we’ve appreciated having nurses that previously attended Lucas stop by to see how he’s doing, while continuing to give us support and advice about this next stage in his care.  It was also really special to have a second visit from two great nurses at the Washington Hospital Center who were with Lucas during his first harrowing week of life.  It’s wonderful to have folks show genuine concern and interest for our son beyond what they have to do as part of their health care job.  We’ve thanked the nurses before but the respiratory specialists should also be recognized as unsung heros who really advocate for the little guy, not to mention other nearby NICU babies with respiratory challenges.