No News is . . . well, No News

Sometimes I think a turtle on Benadryl would make more forward progress than Brynn. But then I remember that between the tortoise and the hare, the tortoise still won the race, right?

Well, the therapist came on Saturday and gave us some exercises to do. Apparently Brynn has muscle tone and is strong enough, but she sucks using the wrong part of her tongue. In short, although she gives a pretty good effort (sometimes), she doesn't get much milk for all her work. It'll likely be a couple weeks or more before the exercises will contribute to any progress.

In the hopes that each feeding attempt might be a little more effective, we've gone from four oral feeds per day down to two. So far, I haven't really noticed any major change. Just when I think she might be making headway, she has a couple days that make her net gain pretty much zero again.

She also has an MRI tomorrow, just so the doctors can at least rule out neurological problems. Since many of her oral reflexes are inconsistent at best, totally missing at worst, they think it'll be wise to see if she sustained any head trauma that was not visible on the early ultrasounds.

Honestly, I think the MRI will come back without any serious bad news. After all, I firmly believe Brynn will eventually learn to eat--I just don't know when. It's quite possible that the steroids we had to use for her lungs are contributing to the delays.

One Nurse Practitioner said that it's possible she could come home on an NG tube; but the next Practitioner said the chances were pretty slim the Neonatologist would allow that. To be honest, at this point I'm hoping more for a lenient Neonatologist than for Brynn to eat. At least then she'd be home. Today, my little girl is 39 weeks gestation and I really hope we don't have to stay much past her due date (February 9th).

I like to think that Brynn is also praying that she will be able to come home:

Natalie