So it's all happening! Sarah-Hope had her anti-reflux procedure and gastronomy tube insertion on Friday, 27 January 2012. The operation was a success and since she's been home she's already taking much bigger feeds and they are going much faster than with the nasogastric tube. With this comes the major progression... from 8 feeds a day to 7, yahoo! While this is now the official feeding schedule, the truth is that we mostly only managed to give her 7 feeds a day anyway by making the terrible mistake of thinking we would take a short nap before the midnight feed... or 6am feed... or 9am feed... and then sleeping through our alarm clocks and snooze alarms repeatedly... waking up in a panic an hour or two later trying to work out how to fit all her feeds in! But, despite her parents, she is growing... and we had our first smile!
Sarah-Hope will be having heart surgery on Monday, 13 February. Its a fairly simply procedure to close her arterial duct as this is allowing too much blood into the lungs which adds to Sarah-Hope's breathlessness. Looking forward to some progress with oral feeding once this is done. She will also have multiple platelet transfusions before and after the surgery, as was done last time... and we hope that unlike last time, she will not develop a sugar addiction from the nurses putting sucrose on her dummy! We didn't realise this... and Sarah-Hope went cold-turkey on us trying to shake her newfound love for sugar. Eventually, thinking all the crying may be an indication that she could still be in pain from her surgery, Rich drove back to NICU to have her checked out. A nurse offered her some sucrose... she sucked that dummy so hard it created a vacuum and a red ring around her mouth, but she was totally satisfied! And so Rich came home with a syringe of the magic stuff and we weaned her off over a couple of days...”
