Clothes?

When we got to the hospital this morning we were suprized to find Payton with a onezee on. Besides a knit hat and some socks she has never worn clothes before. She's a month old today, so it's probably about time she got dressed!

Yesterday was good. She went to the OR yesterday morning to have what's called a PICC line inserted. It is basically a long term IV catheter, but I cut and pasted this paragraph about it for those of you who are more curious.

A PICC is a long, very thin, soft plastic tube made of silicone or polyurethane that is placed in a small blood vessel to allow IV fluids and medications to be given. The primary reason for a PICC is to allow for IV nutrition to be given over a long period of time without having to frequently replace an IV. The normal short IV usually last only 1-3 days before needing to be replaced. A PICC can often be maintained for 2-3 weeks, or longer. Infants most likely to benefit from a PICC include very immature infants, infants with bowel problems preventing feeding, and infants who require a very long course of IV medication.

They also did some work on her neck wound. This is a direct answer to our prayers. They were able to pull the wound together and they didn't not have to do a skin graft. What they did was loosen up the skin around the edge of the wound and then pull that loose skin together and then just used stitches and some "medical superglue" to close it up in a "T" shape. While she was in the OR and under anesthesia they also removed the two skin tags that she had in front of her right ear and removed a little cartilage that was under the skin left over from the tag on her cheek that fell off a while ago. She was reintubated (back on the ventilator) for all of this, but came off it shortly after. They did not put what's called a "G Tube" in during this time though, like we thought they might. This is the tube that would go directly into her gut to feed her breastmilk. They still plan to do this soon, but they wanted to do a couple other tests first. They did one this morning to test if she has reflux. It came back undetermined. And, finally, they took out some of her stitches yesterday as well. They took out every other stitch on her chest incision and they took out some stitches from another incision she had on her abdomen. They also took out an IV line from one of her legs, so right now she just has the PICC line in and an IV line in her other leg, as well as a drainage tube in behind her ear to drain the fluid from her neck and ear skin tag stuff.

She is doing really well today though. She has a busy weekend ahead of her with a steady influx of visitors, which started this morning. We are looking forward to the visitors, however, especially after a relatively visitor-free week.

Thank you for continuing to pray for Payton. Our precious Lord has been so good. You can continue to pray that all of her incisions and scars would heal well. Also, you can pray that she would be able to begin feeding soon. Obviously, we would love to have her be able to feed orally, but we'll take the G tube method too. Finally, you can pray that she will continue to gain strength that she will need in order to coordinate the function of all of her systems on her own.

This is a picture of the booties that Payton's primary nurse made for her!

This is her with her wound vac on. It's kinda Star Wars esk.