Happy Two Months Benton!

Reaching for the stars!

A few days ago Benton turned two months old!  Wow does time fly by!  I can't believe my little boy is already two months old and is 32 weeks gestastionally.  It's absolutely amazing that he is here with us today and with each passing day he gets more active and alert.  The past few days he has been opening his eyes a ton and trying to grab his tube and give high fives.

Since my last post it has been an effort in slow and steady improvement and do I ever mean slow. S-L-O-W...  Benton is slowly getting weaned off his various medications and starting his feeds again.  This past week he had an echocardiogram, a chest x-ray and another brain ultrasound.  The results of the echo showed that the pulmonary hypertension in his heart had improved and they no longer saw right to left shunting but only left to right shunting.  This means that his pulmonary hypertension looked to be almost gone so the doctors have been able to wean him off a lot of the medication they had been using to artificially increase his blood pressure.  Now his dopamine is gone, his antibiotics have completed and they are slowly weaning the hydrocortisone (a steroid) for his lungs.  In addition, they have weaned his nitric oxide down from 8 to 4 and the pressures on his ventilator are down from 37 to 33.  All of these changes have been very positive, but at the same time each time he takes a step forward he often takes a step back.  Now that they have been able to wean so many items his oxygen requirement is much higher and has been vacillating between 85-100%.

In other good news his brain ultrasound showed no change from the last one which means he does not have any cysts in his brain or obvious signs of long term damage.  This was great news since the cysts that cause long term damage tend to show up a few weeks after an injury to the brain (such as when he had such low oxygen levels there over the holidays).  In addition, his chest x-ray showed that his lungs seemed to be improving.

Now we are just hoping and praying that his lungs continue to improve, that his edema continues to slowly recede, that he tolerates his feeds and that he doesn't get any new infections.  Please keep sending the love and prayers!

Cutie pie!