Making Progress...

L*ily is making some progress with oral feedings. Over the weekend, I have seen her improve in her "quality" and now we are looking at her need to improve her "quantity." In other words, she organized her mouth more quickly and stayed with it longer throughout her feedings this past weekend and into this week. She can suck-swallow-breathe for longer periods of time which allows her to take more volume in less time. She still needs to "take a break" in the middle of most feedings as she tires. However, yesterday she took 55% of her milk orally - this is about a 20% increase over Saturday and Sunday. Because of her progress, the doctors have decided to wait again until Thursday to decide whether or not she needs a G-tube - they want to see if she plateaus or continues to increase her volumes in the next couple of days. My understanding then is that if she continues to increase, we stay until she can take full feeds for a day or two and go home without a tube. If she plateaus or declines, they will then schedule surgery to insert the G-tube sometime next week. I am encouraged by her progress in the last couple days and especially today when she took the whole bottle at her last feeding! If she continues to increase, we still don't know when we would be ready to leave.

Pray that she continues to increase her oral feedings. Our prayer of course is to avoid the G-tube if possible.

Should she need surgery, she will likely be in through Th*anksgiving. We are praying that we would be emotionally prepared for this, should this happen.

Pray for D*ave and Z*oe as D*ave and I make decisions about how to continue juggling, etc and how to do what is best for both our daughters.

Pray for our families who have picked up a lot of slack to help us out and to help Z get through this difficult time.

Continue to pray for both D*ave and I through this - L will be 3 weeks on Thursday and the separation for all of us is getting old!

I will let you know what happens as the week progresses...