A big milestone

Woody's improvement continues, and with it, Maggie got the first opportunity that either of us has had to hold him. She was a little (ok, a lot) nervous at first, but quickly settled into the idea of having this fragile little baby laying on her. I was pretty jealous, but it makes sense letting her have the first turn and having him listen to her heartbeat for awhile.

He's now 17 days old, and it's amazing to me how quickly he seems to have turned things around. Only about five days ago his condition seemed pretty dire to me, and now it seems like everything is improving at some level. The only big concern remains the respiration, as he has not been able to drop the pressure requirements too much on the ventilator, nor come down consistently on the O2 needs.

However, even on that front I remain very optimistic. As I pay more and more attention, I realize that my thinking on the issue of oxygen requirements has gotten a bit more sophisticated-- I used to look solely at how much he needed, but now I realize that the pressures needed to force the air into his lungs has a great deal to do with how he's doing as well. For example, a higher pressure need may be worse for him than a higher O2 need, but I might have looked at the lower O2 number on his ventilator and felt just fine about it. On the flip side, I have come into his room a couple of times in the last few days and noted a higher O2 number, but felt fine about it because it was with much lower pressures than he has needed in the past. And as long as his lungs are getting better, I'm not going to worry as much about the minutiae of everyday care.

Another sign of how we think he is improving is that Maggie and I felt good enough to actually go out last night. We saw the St. Paul Saints minor league team (they lost) on "Love Boat Night." Ostensibly, this was to honor the 30th anniversary of the television show. The gate prize of a purple and yellow boat with "Minnetonka Queen" on the side might lead one to believe that the Saints were, in fact, trying rather to make fun of another local sports franchise. Maybe.