3 March

Morning – he’s doing well. Scott (consultant) made a few checks and decided to put him on intra-nasal air (which he loved). Again, his oxygen requirements have gone back up (he was down to around 30% on CPAP), but hopefully will quickly drop.
His gastric tube has been on a ‘drain’ operation, where the stomach juices have been allowed to flow upwards and out the tube into a collection pot. They have measured this output to see how the stomach is going and if there’s any problems from the digestion point of view. Scott has taken this away, now, and put the little stopper back in the end of the tube. This means the secretions will stay in the stomach, and hopefully begin to work their way through the bowel. Scott says he can only hear small / infrequent bowel sounds (apparently he had an abdominal x-ray yesterday before he was extubated to ensure it all looked good), so hopefully allowing these secretions to pass through the bowel will prepare the gut for some kind of feeding tomorrow.
We hope that the feeds will be EBM (Expressed Breast Milk) from tomorrow, rather than Elecare (a very elemental formula). The milk room told us to start storing the milk at home (from about mid-January) as they had a couple of shelves in their freezers of “Max Milk”. There’s not much in each bottle, but with 6 bottles a day, it soon mounts up. We, too, are starting to run out of room at home, but I am assured nothing gets thrown out and we get to take it all home if it’s not used up by his discharge date!
After he was put onto intra-nasal, Nina (nurse) turned him onto his stomach. Normally he loves this position, but he simply wouldn’t lie with his head to the side. Whichever way we put his head, he’d turn him back and lie face-down into the mattress. I had to take a photo before leaving Nina to work out what to do! We’ll go back today and have a cuddle- first in almost a week!

Later – we went back in at about 6pm and Max was still on intra-nasal oxygen. He was also in a Big Bed again, and was dressed! We’re hopefully back to at least where we were on Sunday last week (pre-operation). I got to have a cuddle, for about 30 minutes.