Finn is four weeks old tomorrow.

After all the commotion from a week ago, Finn has settled down nicely and things have generally been uneventful — and “uneventful” in the NICU is a really good thing. He finished his course of antibiotics for pneumonia this morning, Friday, August 19 at 5:00 am, and it certainly seems to have done the trick.

Yet another follow up echo on Wednesday, August 17 showed that the PDA (treated by two separate rounds of medicine by this point) was still trivial. So while it hadn’t yet closed, it also hadn’t reopened at all; there had been no change from the week before. Given that Finn was no longer showing any negative symptoms from it, the verdict was that we don’t really even have to monitor for it anymore; the natural process is that over the coming months, the PDA will close and become a ligament. So no heart surgery necessary, which (needless to say) is a great thing, and shows that his cardiovascular system as a whole is on the right track.

Not to be outdone, Finn’s respiratory system took a step forward this week as well. He’s still on the ventilator despite his best efforts, having extubated himself on three separate occasions, but he’s also doing the things he needs to do to lose the ventilator on a more permanent basis. The automatic breaths per minute given to him have been dropped all the way to 22 today after being in high 30s just last week (for comparison’s sake, Finn is breathing anywhere between 50 to 70 times per minute on average, so he’s doing a lot of the work on his own); the pressure behind those extra breaths has been slowly weaned; and his oxygen requirements are generally in the 26% to 32% range. A week ago, we talked to the neonatologist about how Finn was likely going to need a round of steroids to help bring his lung development along; now, we’re talking about continuing to wean him to see if he can graduate from the ventilator as early as next week without the steroids.

Definitely not unrelated to the foregoing is that Finn is now up to 15 mL (half an ounce) of breast milk every three hours, and he’s tipping the scales at over 2 pounds, 2 ounces. The more he eats, the bigger and stronger he gets, which can only help the development of his lungs (along with everything else).

And with bigger feedings inevitably come bigger poops… which is a good thing! Finn has been under the blue phototherapy lights off and on over the past 27 days as his bilirubin has fluctuated up and down, but bowel movements are the best way to flush out the excess bilirubin. So we’re hopeful Finn’s incubator will cease doubling as his “baby tanning bed” sometime soon.

Finn’s recent milestones include:

• (We missed one in the last post!)  On Friday, August 12, Finn upgraded from the tiniest diapers (WeePee diapers) to the Pampers preemie diapers. Sure, they’re a little big on him — they’re for babies 6 pounds and under, so he’ll be in them for quite some time — but after at least one blowout, he really needed the extra room!
• On Monday, August 15, Finn stopped his fentanyl drip, and he seems to be tolerating life without pain medication.