NICU Diary Day 36

Saturday, November 11, 2000

Today is my five-week birthday!

I am really growing and have almost doubled my birth size. I now weigh a little over 4 ½ pounds and am up to 40 cc of milk every three hours.

I am doing really well on my ventilator “sprints.” Today I made it fourteen hours on full-pressure support. That means that I initiate every breath on my own; the machine doesn’t help me breathe at all. The ventilator does help me inflate my lungs when I initiate a breath. This way my lungs are getting practice for how much they need to inflate for me to breath on my own. Once I can make it 24 hours on this setting, the doctors will start taking me off the vent completely for small increments, gradually working up to 24 hours of solo breathing!

P.S. I got my first vaccine shot today. It was for Hepatitis B.