18 Weeks

Oliver is 18 weeks old now, or two weeks adjusted.  He weighs 8 1/2 pounds.  Last week David and I met with Oliver's medical team for a Care Conference.  We discussed the possibility of bringing him home even though he isn't eating by mouth fully yet.  Nothing could be decided for sure, since we were still waiting on another eye exam, but it was good to hear that we were getting close.

Oliver's eye exam was on Monday, and the left eye was looking great.  His eye surgeon felt that it still had several weeks before needing surgery.  However, his right eye needed action immediately.  While they had originally told us that the Avastin injections were one and done, they now felt that a second injection could possibly bring the right eye up to where the left eye had gotten to.  Or, they could go ahead and do the laser surgery on both eyes.  Surgery immediately meant that the frequent eye exams would be over, so we'd be able to bring him home as soon as he recovered.  But, it would mean a loss of peripheral vision that could be saved by waiting a little longer.  We decided that his vision was more important than bringing him home a couple of weeks earlier, so on Tuesday they injected the right eye with a second dose of Avastin.  Because Avastin is still in the research stages of retinopathy treatment, they can't give us any guarantees, but since the first injections helped so much, we're hopeful. 

As of his eye exam on Friday, his eye is looking like it's making more progress.  They will do another exam on Monday, and if it still looks good, we'll start discussing bringing him home. On Friday he weighed 8 lbs 11.5 ounces!

If we bring Oliver home in the next few weeks, he'll be coming home on a feeding tube.  He's still taking thickened formula for his bottle feedings, taking from 15 to 50 ml at a time.  Since he's now on a 4 hour feeding schedule, he gets 90 ml at each feeding.  So the remainder of what he doesn't take gets put through the tube.  Several of the nurses have said that almost as soon as the kiddos get settled at home they relax and get the bottle thing down right away.  Right now, every second to third bottle is given by someone different.  I'm there for his 1 pm bottle every day, David's there for 1 or 2 on the weekends, and then he has a different nurse come on every 12 hours.  They believe once it's just David and I doing all the feedings, he'll get the hang of it.