wow! a mere 16 days after hitting 2 pounds, eric weighed in at 1370 grams tonight! or 3 pounds 0.3 ounces! it’s absolutely stupendously amazing that he’s gained a whole pound in such a short time, especially when he’s been so sick.

i guess he really does have the snowdeal genes, since putting on weight has never really been a problem for generations of snowdeal men. it’s amazing to see how quickly his appearance is changing on a day-to-day basis with the weight gains.

eric is also getting 4 cc’s of breastmilk every 2 hours. he has a long way to go to be considered on “full feeds”, as he’d need to be getting about 19 cc’s of milk every two hours before they’ll discontinue his IV completely. still, he’s making great progress and seems to be tolerating the milk quite well.

and he has a mere 2 days left on his antibiotic regime to treat the pneumonia and suspected sepsis. interestingly, after all the hullaballoo surrounding the sepsis it appears that the gram negative stuff they found in the yeast culture was likely a contaminant. i guess that’s the way it works sometimes.

also, the eye doctor came by for his regular ROP checkup and didn’t detect any sign of abnormal blood vessel growth in his retinas. while this is great news, the doctor felt the need to warn us that not only was eric not out of the woods – he wasn’t even in the woods yet! now that’s some smooth bedside manner. he then stated matter of factly that eric’s most vulnerable stage will be between 33 and 39 weeks and that most 24 and 25 weekers will develop stage I or stage II of the condition. so, once again, while we’re extremely happy that his eyes are fairing well, his next few checkups will be the ones that will really give a better idea of if he’ll develop ROP.

and just as we suspected, they’ve started testing eric out on the nasal cannula again, with 2 hours of nasal cannula, followed by 6 hours of cpap. and despite my many attempts to miminize the appearance of one of the side effects of the cpap mask, sometimes it’s impossible to hide the conehead that he can get from the tight cpap straps pushing against his very soft head.

he seems to be tolerating the nasal cannula very well and is continuing his streak of remaining alarm free! that’s right – he hasn’t had a single incidence of apnea or bradycardia. it really is hard to believe that he’s showing such great improvements in such a short period of time. i guess it’s hard to remember that things can get better just as quickly as they can turn for the nurse. such is the way of the nicu.