Mood rings

This is the little man this morning. He has the breathing tube in place and the feeding tube is the little one coming from the nose. He is also getting a blood transfusion as seen by the blood in the IV tubing. You can see the top of his dressing over his chest incision. We covered up the belly for 2 reasons, 1 is that is where all the chest tubes and other stuff is going on and 2 is that these blankets are made by people and donated for these kids in the cardiac ICU. I posted their link on my FB page and here as well www.lilybellegreen.org. Read her story. It is a good group of people that do good things.

Today's title has to do with Owen's nipples. You can tell how well he is perfusing these days by the color of his nipples. when he is mad the blue/purple and when he is happy they are nice and pink so his nurse yesterday started calling them mood rings. Owen is doing good today. They want him to be more awake and moving around to get the fluids out of him and he has been. You can tell he just wants to scream and cry. They have had to calm him down with meds today a few times. It is hard to try to console a baby when you can't give them what they want. He loves to be swaddled but we can't because of all the lines and tubes, he loves movement but he is a little tied down to the bed, he loves to eat and they have started that to try to stimulate his gut. He gets a whopping 2 mls a hour through a NG tube they placed (about 30 calories/day per Chels). They will cut his feeding off in the morning because it will be time to remove the breathing tube again tomorrow and it will go better this time. They have been tanking him up all day. He was transfused with 2 baby units of blood and is ready to go. He is one tough little guy. His labs all look good, he is almost down to room air on his vent settings. Things are looking good.

I knew this would be a better day when I called this morning to see how he was doing and his nurse said "Owen has been doing great, He has been awake and calm but he keeps giving the WTF face" I started to laugh because I have had that same thought and to hear from his nurse was funny. It's sounds like something that I would say.

We weren't sure what type of day it would be when Chelsea woke up to pump at 530am and our bed collapsed (again). This bed, graciously supplied by Ron, has a plastic bed frame, that fits together in puzzle piece grooves. It fell apart last time late at night before bed, and this time in the am. The mattress basically folds in half when the frame collapses if you can picture that. So Chelsea is sitting in the half that has collapsed and I feel like I am on a weird fair ride laying down. The only good part about having to put our bed back together when you are hours from waking is that I found out (1.5 weeks later) that our bed was a sleep number. Allright!

Chelsea and I look forward to seeing Owen every morning, and we also get very excited to find out what our bus drivers name for the day is going to be. Yesterday we had a man by the name Bong, later Biu, today it was Benito. I also hopped on another bus just to check the driver's name and play dumb and it back off like I was on the wrong bus. His name was Vern. Today Chels and I had a chance to get free chair massages at the hospital. The 10 minutes were great! There is a lady on staff that does this 2 times a week at this location. How cool is that. They also had dogs here today. I felt like a kid myself. Those who know me know that I love dogs and would own 20 if Chelsea would let me. It brought an instant smile to my face. Not much else going on today. Big day tomorrow keep our fingers crossed for a better time.

-Chris