High-care ups and downs

Jessica gained another 80g weight yesterday but this morning we were happy to see that she had lost a little weight (30g) so hopefully she is now starting to lose any excess fluid and now weighs in at 4350g (9lb 9oz). It seems very strange to be pleased that she has lost weight rather than gained! She had a chest X-ray yesterday to check that there is no excess fluid accumulating in her chest and this was fine.

Jessica is still being mostly tube-fed with the Monogen and we are getting more confident at checking her tube and giving her feeds with this. Louise no longer needs to be supervised when doing this and Michael has almost reached the point where he doesn’t need to be supervised either. Jessica is getting a little better at taking the Monogen via a bottle but we haven’t yet managed to get her to finish the whole bottle! She had her feeding tube replaced yesterday which seemed to cause some irritation as she was quite sick with the next couple of feeds but has mostly been fine today.

This morning, Jessica was all set to move across to the nursery when the monitor started picking up brief moments where her heart rate was up to around 235bpm. This happened a couple of times yesterday and on screen it looked as though the probe on her foot wasn’t picking up a proper trace but when it was repeated again today, she went back on the ECG which confirmed that there were some irregular beats causing this. Dr Gnanapragasam, our consultant, explained that this was due to supraventricular tachycardia (SVT) which is where her heartbeat is initiated in another part of her heart as well as the sinoatrial (SA) node, where the heartbeat is usually initiated. She has been given a couple of doses of digoxin to suppress these irregular beats.

Whilst she is still having the occasional moment where her heart rate goes back up over 200bpm, this is very short-lived (less than 20 seconds) and she doesn’t seem bothered by it. It does mean though that she needs to be back on the ECG monitor for the next couple of days and staying in high-care for the time being and may also need to go on digoxin for a while if these irregular beats don’t resolve. She also had another echo this afternoon and all looked well on this plus she has also been managing to keep her oxygen saturation levels up in air so is now off the oxygen again.

Otherwise, Jessica continues to do well although still spends quite a lot of her time sleeping as she is still recovering from her operation. She had a lovely visit from Nanny and cousin Wayne yesterday and has been enjoying lots of cuddles.