Ups and downs

I mentioned a few days ago that if Woody's having a bad day, I like to wait until I have good news to report to post. So of course today Blogger was out having a massage all afternoon* so I couldn't post an update, which led one of Maggie's aunts to think that Woody was having a crisis and therefore to get freaked out.

Well, no. At least not then. And Woody's not having a crisis now, but he is having a little bit of a rough night in terms of some adverse test results. The ol' CO₂ concentration in his blood is up, the pH is down, and his Potassium is also high again, which is a little worrisome because it can indicate that he is having some more trouble with his kidneys. But I have reason to believe that this is a pretty minor setback. First, his pH is not nearly as low as it has been in earlier crises-- it was 7.20 tonight, which is bad, but not nearly as low as the 7.11 that is his all time low (which got him a quick trip onto the oscillator). Second, the doctors are again trying to get him weaned off the corticosteroids, which he was on earlier because little preemies have issues with their adrenal systems, but by the time they get to 27 or 28 weeks gestational they ought to be figuring it out by then. The last little crisis he had was precipitated, we think, by an earlier attempt to make him go off the cortisone before he was ready to provide his own physiological dose. So he may be reacting to the wean on that again. Finally, he is peeing still, which means he's nowhere near as bad as the last blood gas rough spot, so that is another reason not to freak out. We'll see what happens tomorrow, but I don't think it's worth a lot of fretting yet.

In good news, Woody continues to have excellent progress in the realm of eating and excreting. One of his nurses (we'll call her nurse J) was noting that he was seeming cranky so she checked his ventilator tube to make sure it wasn't plugged or otherwise needing suction, and checked various other things to see if he needed something fixed, only to figure out that he had a ... rather full diaper, and he seemed to hate that. He's now getting an increase of 1 cc a feeding every 12 hours, so he's already up to 6 ccs of milk every two hours, which is pretty huge.

A setback night, maybe, but I'm not too worried. I think he's still doing great.

*I never know exactly what I can assume my audience knows. I heard, for example, that a paternal relative had trouble understanding my email address that is on the bottom of the page; I thought that writing out "at" and "dot" was fairly standard practice for people on the web to post their email address while avoiding spammers (i.e., writing 'crazyATbunnyfireDOTcom' would be crazy@bunnyfire.com). Anyway, I'll just go ahead and point out for those who are not as "with it" on the "interweb" that "Blogger" is a web publishing service that I use, which is why I seem so darn good at this computer stuff despite the fact that I'm not "with it" on the "interweb" compared to a lot of people. "Taking a massage" is just a smartass way of saying that Blogger was having technical difficulties.