As we had hoped, Eleanor's progress back from surgery has been very quick. Babies heal quickly when compared to adults but other than the bump in the road on day one, her healing has been fast. A lot of factors feed into this.
1) She is awake and alert. we got her off the heavy drugs quickly and have resisted the urge to put her back on when she is in pain. Tylenol does the trick for almost everyhting so why use a bigger tool than you need?
2) Her bowels are moving and making good colored stools. I never thought that I could qualitatively assess a baby poop, but I am getting pretty good at it. color? texture? smell? I can describe them all in clinical terms.
3) Her stomach is in good shape and is moving its juices down steadily. We capped her G-tube at noon on Friday and so far she has handled this very well. Her stomach has been soft, she has burped like a good Brogan to control her gas and she is relatively comfortable with a bit of tylenol given to her in an un ladylike place every four hours or so.
She is still uncomfortable in her colon, or large intestine as things move through. Before this week's surgery it had only been used a tiny bit and had shrunken to be a 'microcolon'. As we teach it to behave as the surgeon told us, 'stretch it out like a tube sock', it is a bit grumpy but a little bit of tylenol takes the edge off and she is happy.
All this leads to today's big news that we are starting to feed her again this afternoon. Very slowly at first and given by a very cold and unloving pump, but we are going to give her some breast milk again and see if she can move that through as well as she has moved the other stuff through.
The next baby step is a bottle to get her mouth in on the action again and take advantage of all of those repetitions that she does all day with her binky.
Baby steps on the bus, Bob.
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