A Good Day!

So I set up the hospital's website updating thingy, but anyone who wants to see it has to create an account and login everytime which is just stupid so I'll just post updates here when I can.

Today was a good day!

Brett and I had gotten to the hospital early this morning as Helena was scheduled for a catheter procedure to open a hole in the upper chambers of her heart. This hole is supposed to be there, unlike the VSD in the lower chambers of her heart. Her oxygen levels haven't been as good as we had hoped, so the thought was that opening this hole would allow for more blood to mix and raise her oxygen levels.

The cardiology team sent someone down to do an echo on her, and after looking at that they decided to cancel the catheter procedure! Helena's lungs still have a lot of pressure in them, which is normal - babies are born with a lot of pressure in their lungs and it slowly goes down. Based on what they saw on the echo the cards team decided to NOT do the procedure, but give her some more time to let that pressure in her lungs go down on its own and see if that helps raise her oxygen levels at all. Awesome news to hear! If the levels don't go down, we'll re-evaluate and perhaps do the procedure later, but for now we're going to give her body a chance to see what it does on its own.

Because she isn't having the procedure done, she gets to be fed again which she LOVES. She is currently being fed through a tube down her throat because she's on oxygen and it's just too difficult for her to manage sucking/swallowing while receiving the amount of oxygen she is getting. But that doesn't seem to bother her, she gets very excited when she's being fed and has been very angry that she hasn't been eating the last few days (when they stop the tummy feeds, she is getting nutrients and stuff through an IV, so it's not like she's starving or anything).

But the most exciting thing that happened today was that Brett got to hold her :)

Because she was on the ventilator (she's now just on oxygen through her nose) we hadn't been able to hold her until now and it really did wonders for all of us. We felt better, and we think she did too :)