Hello all!  Again today we helped with the dressing change, while we were doing the change the surgeon from the children's hospital came to see the omphalocele without the dressing on it.  While he was there he wanted to chat with us about the future plans for Maddy.  He said that they are now going to feed her my milk!! They are going to feed her through that same tube that was originally sucking out her stomach. They are going to do those feeds for a while and depending on how well she does then they will change her to bottle feedings!!  They also want to give her some milk on a q-tip and have her suck it off, they said that if you wait too long to give babies food by mouth they then later forget to feed or they will refuse to feed by mouth.  So that is wonderful news!!  Also the surgeon said that they are planning to transfer Madison to the children's hospital by the end of this week.  He said that she is not sick enough to stay at Foothills!!  The surgeon also said that once Madison is at the children's occupational therapy is going to come in and fit her for a neoprene cover for her omphalocele that will put gentle pressure on the sac and slowly put the organs in her abdominal cavity.  He reminded us that we will have to be patient because it is a long and slow process.  I asked him about when we will be allowed to hold her, and he said that as soon as the sac becomes harder, and she gets the special cover we will be allowed to hold her and walk around with her in the hospital!!! So hopefully the transfer will take place this Friday, but anything can happen.
On a different note, Madison's blood cultures came back fine, again, but unfortunately, the CRP blood test that they did came back high, so today they did a lumbar puncture on her!  They took some cerebral spinal fluid so that they could culture it.  The preliminary screen showed that everything was fine, but they have to culture the fluid, so it will be a few days before the final results are in.  The nurse practitioner that we saw yesterday came over that talked with me about the lumbar puncture and she said that they did it because some babies can have meningitis even though their blood cultures are negative.  I also over heard her in the evening rounds telling the staff that they did the blood cultures and the lumbar puncture because there is a tear in the omphalocele sac, but in all the days of doing the dressing change we have never seen any tear...I don't know why no one told us about this tear that by the sounds of it happened at least a few days ago.
So tomorrow I have to go to the doctor for my lovely blood pressure that even now has been through the roof!! Who knows what they will do to me, but hopefully nothing too crazy like making me stay at the hospital for two days!
Anyways, talk to you later, I am going to bed!!