Take your PICC

Since we have talked about the PICC line, I will not bore you with its uses. I will tell you that it has been removed!

The biggest issue with removing this line is that means that he tolerating his feeding, which is a very good.

It seems like there is always a cloud to silver linings and silver linings to clouds in this issue so this is no exception. When the doctor removed the PICC line, they discovered that a section of the line had "pressed" his skin in his leg to the point that it has opened a 1 cm sore. They have sent cultures down to be analyzed and have been administering antibiotics to combat the possibility of infection as that would be a major bad thing to have happen at this stage.

We have not seen the sore, but if it is anything like the small cut on his scalp from his first couple days, this will go away very quickly and not be an issue.

The other "issue" that arose today is that he is somewhat cold. His temp was around 35.9 while he should be somewhere around 36.5 or so. Because of this, Julie was not able to hold him today and they have set up a monitoring device on him that automatically heats or cools the incubation unit based on his temperature needs. He has had this set up before so this is no big deal.

The promising part of this issue is that some of the nurses think that his marginal weight gain could be due to him using all his energy (calories) to heat himself rather than having those calories promote weight gain. He is above birth weight, but they think that he should be gaining more weight than he has. They are targeting weight gains of 15g to 30g per day and we are looking at 5g an awful lot and are even losing weight some days.

So there you have it. I hope this is a better update than the last few days. With me working later nights now and then I hope to update like this more often on my days off. If you have any questions please feel free to leave them in the comments section and we will do our best to answer them or ask the doctors and get answers.

Since I have not included a photo in a while, here are a few;

I like this one because he looks like he is just sprawled out chillin.

All the photos with the blue light on look so Star Trek to me..........this one is the most Star Trek looking I think.