As many of you know, Nick had a rough start.
First it was the lungs. We had to have those blown open with forced air in the ICU just minutes after he was born. That was fixed in the first 20 minutes or so of life, when they realized that his kidneys weren’t working quite right.
They jacked him into the machines and had him on IV feeding for a few days, and by three or four days into life, the old kidneys turned right on.
Then, it was the weight. When these kids are born, the first thing they do is lose weight. They lose a few ounces here and there and the generally accepted rule is to make sure that they’re back up to birth weight in two weeks.
We didn’t hit that. We were outside the normal range but a pretty sizable margin. Of course, that keeps the medical folks in a tizzy thinking that things still aren’t working, sending us to doc after doc, specialist after specialist, hypothesizing and theorizing…
That’s the space we’ve been in over the last five weeks.
Last Friday, Nick weighed in at 6 lbs 2 oz. That was up 6 oz from his weight of two weeks prior. There has been much stress around the old homestead because of that slow gain — we should be seeing about an oz of gain per day to make for solid normal growth.
Well, today, at our weekly weigh-in, Nick hit 6 lbs 8 oz. That’s six ounces up in just seven days. So, he’s cruising on the normal path, according to the pediatrician, and while they want us in again in a week, they’re finally confident that things are on the up and up.