Friday, October 12: Out in the Open!

Ashton graduated from his incubator today! I was so tired yesterday from being at the hospital all day and not getting much sleep because of having to pump (which is why I didn't blog last night), so I didn't make it in to see him until almost noon today. When I got here, our nurse was super excited and said she had a surprise for me. I went in his room and he was out in the open in a little bassinet, and he also had a much smaller cannula (oxygen tube) in his nose! So he has hardly any oxygen support. We're super happy about that :-)

We're also trying to breastfeed some more. He tried once yesterday and twice today and is doing much better, but he still has a ways to go before he can get his feeding tube taken out. But once he learns how to eat, he can go home!

Not much else has happened since Wednesday...We're still waiting for the chromosome tests to come back. We got a basic report, but it didn't show anything, so they're running a different, more in-depth test to see if they can find anything. We also got the biopsy results back from his branchial clefts (if that's for sure what they are), and all it said was that they aren't sinuses/cavities as we had originally thought. So tomorrow the doctor is going to take a look at the results and see if he can find anything more significant so that we can have a better idea of what we're dealing with. But it sounds like the biopsy didn't really reveal very much.

Kirk and I are definitely starting to feel the effects of being at the hospital day and night, and these last couple of days have been exhausting. I never knew how tired I could get from constantly pumping, trying to get Ashton to breastfeed (and learn how to myself), and then running to and from the house to eat and such. I'm hoping it will get a bit better once he's home, but I'm not really counting on it! I guess they weren't joking when they said that being a mom is the hardest job in the world...but I'm convinced that it's completely worth it!