Time to eat... alphabet soup?

Woody's release date is still tentatively set for Friday. Tentatively? It's Wednesday, you say. Yeah. Well, since Woody's little UTI was discovered last week, he's not been doing as well as he was doing before with some basic eating skills. For one, he's not been as hungry. For two, he's been having some basic puking issues. For three, he's not gaining weight as well as he was.

This might be a major issue for other kids, but I'm not that worried about it for Woody. He's always been a trooper with the feedings, and to me it's pretty easy to explain his issues: he's been on strong intravenous antibiotics, and he's been sick. Do YOU like to pig out as much as normal when you're feeling punky? I didn't think so. Besides, it's not like he's been losing weight. He's been gaining at around 8 or 9 g/kilo, and they want him to gain at 15, so his issues are really incremental as opposed to being precipitous ones. And he's now over 9 pounds, so he's quite the little chunk.

The basic issue here is that his round of antibiotics are done tonight, so we'll see how he reacts when he's not having explosive digestive issues due to the drugs. As long as he shows improvement with his feedings, he'll still get out on Friday, which is great. What's really odd there is the confusion about whether we want him then. The NP who's been following his case knew our general position, which is that we don't want him sent home unless he's going to be successful, but somewhere along the line that got confused in the translation that we didn't want him to come home for another week or so, so we've been fighting to make it clear that WE WANT HIM HOME. I want him home because I think his recent infection is due to him being in the hospital around other sick kids, and I'm just so tired of having all these other people be in positions of authority about my kid. As I told Maggie, I think the biggest issue that we're going to notice when we get him home is that we're going to realize that we're in charge of him and we don't have to ask permission to take care of our boy. I'm just so. incredibly. tired. of having a nice family moment with Maggie where we're holding him and cooing at him and then five people just barge into the room to poke him and put crap in the cupboards and otherwise just mess with us.

Today we finished the last round of training that is required before they let us have him. Memo to hospital administrators-- is it necessary to have so many acronyms and "helpful" mnemonics for everything? We've learned that when you have an ALTE (Apparent Life Threatening Event) you have to do the AAA (assess appearance and a... something) before you do the CPR, which is characterized by the ABC (Airway, Breathing, Compressions) method, and all of this is worsened by the BPD (bronchopulmonary dysplasia-- or if you prefer, the CLD-- chronic lung disease) that he has. But fortunately the ROP isn't related to any of that BS.

Well, time to get back into his room and try not to get irritated by every single thing that happens in this joint.