The difference between worry and worry

"Don't kid yourself," my mother-in-law said the other day. "Even after he gets out of the hospital, you're still going to worry."

I get her point, really I do. But (I think) there is a huge qualitative difference between being worried about a near-death experience in a hospital and the normal everyday worry about one's kid being hit by a bus. I always tell my own mom to never, ever go research the various things that Woody's been diagnosed with, but I can't take my own advice. So, for example, when I got the diagnosis of the PIE the other day, of course I went out and googled it something fierce. And that's just not a good thing.

But it looks like the roller coaster that is micropreemie care in the NICU is on one of the welcome upswings. Yesterday's news was all good, and this morning things look good too. After I posted yesterday's updates, Woody got moved back from the oscillator to the normal ventilator, and is tolerating that well without any bad blood gas readings that cause the doctors to scramble around figuring out what the deal is. Also, he is being weaned down in terms of pressures and O2 saturation again for the ventilator, which is good, and he is off the blood pressure medication again.

Just like that, it seems like we're back on the imaginary flow chart of preemie care, where we can start thinking about priming the gut for feedings again and stuff like that. Of course we still have a long way to go, even on the lungs. The nurse and I were joking yesterday about how if we can just kick the PIE issue then we "only" have to deal with the "normal" Chronic Lung Disease that he's fighting off. *sigh*

Oh, and check it out: Woody has all the leads now on him like a normal preemie:



Click the picture to see the tags.

A brief note on Maggie: she had her checkup yesterday, and the doctor is happy with her recovery so far. We also got back a lot of test results, and she doesn't have any chronic conditions that would have caused this. In other words, we have no idea what went wrong with the pregnancy, and aren't likely to be able to predict anything happening like that in the future.