Still doing good

So I am not sure if it was clear on the last post that Ethan is not on any oxygen! He has no machine giving him assistance on breathing! I talked to a few people that had read the blog but when I said that he was still off of it they were shocked so I thought I would clarify. He has been off of the oxygen for almost 60 hours now and doing good. We hope this continues. Of course he will have lung issues for a long time since he is considered to have chronic lung disease which means we still have to be careful on where we take him so he doesn't get sick. There is still a chance that he will have to go home on a monitor but hey... we will take no oxygen! He looks so good! After being off of it for 24 hours I requested a blood gas. This is just a simple test they do by pricking his heal for a little blood to see the amount of oxygen in his blood. They were expecting the number to be in the 50-60 range because chronic lung babies tend to run higher, normal is in the 40's and right before he got re-intubated it was 169 which was crazy high. So the test.... yep 48! I wanted the test done just to ease my mind that he was really doing fine without the oxygen assistance so we didn't end up with another surprise intubation process. The only thing we need to conquer now is eating. His food has been going in his belly over an hour and 15 minutes. He is at 50ml of fortified breast milk. Tomorrow they will cut this down to an hour. On Wednesday if all is going well it will stay at an hour and then we will also try breast feeding again.

He did get his hearing test done today. When the nurse told me this I was a little shocked. When I asked about it before they said that they do the test while they are getting ready for the baby to be discharged. So secretly I was thinking... ooh we might be going home sooner than we thought! But nope, she just had to do the test on 2 other babies so she thought she might as well do Ethan too. He passed! Yeah! One more thing checked off the list.