Friday 12th November

Willow and Stanley are 7 weeks old today. So we're officially half way to the full 40 weeks, when we would be aiming to take the babies home. We're keeping all our limbs and digits crossed that that might actually happen.
I think I've still got a cold coming, so don't want to go to the hospital again. I might just be a bit run down, but it's not worth the risk. It's just torture not being able to see the kids.

Anyway, it turns out that the surfactant didn't work; Willow is no better this morning than she was yesterday. It was a long shot anyway, but worth a try before going for the second course of steroids. So, she was started on the dexamethasone this morning .... and the initial result is that her oxygen requirement has gone down from 70ish% to 50ish%. So that's a good sign - it really needs to be under 50% before she gets extubated and taken off the ventilator. It's not just her oxygen requirements that need to be reduced, but also the pressure required to keep her lungs open. It normally takes two or three days to get to this point after starting the steroids, so this weekend is going to be a long one.

In the bed next door, Stanley is still thriving at the moment. He was off CPAP for 18 hours yesterday, and today they want to see if he can last a whole 24 hours on the nasal prongs. This is amazing that he's doing so well; but we are still not getting complacent about it - he's not out of the woods just yet.

They were both weighed today too. Willow is now an incredible 3lbs 9oz, but this is mostly due to her holding a lot of extra weight where she's retaining fluids. Stanley, on the other hand, is still 3lbs 4oz, so he hasn't changed since the last weigh-in ... but, in his case, he was retaining fluids last time, and has since been on diuretics to clear it down. So, a very inconclusive mass-checking session that was. Nothing's ever easy, is it?

In other news - my parking ticket, that was issued approximately ten minutes after Stanley was born, has been retracted after I explained to Poole council that moving the car wasn't my priority at that point. I was hoping for more of a fight actually; we could do with the £25 for being Woman's Own's real-life story of the week.