19 Weeks Old

It's a good thing I have these posts to look back on, otherwise I'm pretty sure I would have lost count of how many weeks old Abby is now - but as it happens, last week was 18, so this week must be 19. ;-)

On Wednesday, Abby finally got to bid the CICU goodbye, and we headed back to our home away from home: the cardiac step-down unit. I can't tell you how happy we were to get back over here. Though we had some wonderful doctors and nurses in the CICU, and had the chance to meet a lot of truly special families, there is a certain tension in the CICU that just doesn't exist in step-down. Just minutes after getting to Abby's new room, we were sitting on the floor with our nurse, NP, and Abby in a bouncer instead of the crib. If we can't be at home, I feel like this is a pretty good substitute. We were laughing and trying to make Abby happy by singing Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer - it was like a huge weight had been lifted.

We're getting to see more glimpses of Abby's personality returning, including lots of smiles during the day and even her first sleep laugh! It's been so good to see our sweet girl having happy moments again after such a rough month.

Unfortunately though, Abby is still having some odd spells of being completely inconsolable for hours and hours on end. Before being extubated this last time, she never had anything even remotely resembling these fits - and the doctors all seem to agree that something's up (I know some babies go through periods like this, but nobody seems to think this can be explained by anything "normal"). They don't know that it's all withdrawal related, so Neuro is getting back involved to make sure that everything she went through post-heart surgery (e.g. the code event, cpr, etc) didn't cause some sort of issue. She'll be having another MRI, as well as a sleep study, to try to get to the bottom of her irritability and breathing issues.

We're looking forward to family coming in for Christmas. Though it may be atypical, we're going to make the most of our first holiday season with our little bird!