Category: Daily Updates
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Week One +4 and +5
Gestational age: 29 weeks +1 day Hi, friends. These two days have been a mixed bag of news – largely a wonderful one. A bag full of mostly kittens. Or the happy noises Lucy makes while she’s eating spaghetti. Yesterday Dr. Hayes granted us our first empirical goal post: If Baby C continued to show…
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Week One +3
Gestational age: 28 weeks +6 days In celebration of another mundane day (“oxygenation of these babies is really working,” says Dr. Hayes proudly, me adjusting the cannula that now feels like part of my face), a melody is linked below that means a lot to this family. This song played randomly from a playlist of…
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Week 1 +2
Gestational age: 28 weeks +5 days An uneventful day on the medical front; just how we like them. Today’s doppler showed stable intermittence in Baby C’s umbilical blood flow, or plainly put, no change. Likewise, for the first time since this began, no change to the treatment plan. On the family front, it was road…
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Week One + 1
Gestational age: 28 weeks +4 days THEY GREW! Today was our first weigh-in since arrival, when we received the heartbreaking news that though Baby B had recently grown to 2 lb 14 oz, C had stalled at 1 lb 15 oz for well over a week. Dr. Hayes has been clear that our aim here…
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Week 1
Gestational Age 28 weeks +3 days One week has elapsed since our lunch plans were so rudely interrupted by Dr. Hayes’ sudden hospitalization order, and while it has been a hard week we are thankful that it has added precious incubation time for our girls. We’d happily take another week if the results would repeat…
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Day 6
Gestational age: 28 weeks +2 days Another partially-cloudy, silver medal, red-ribbon day – and we’ll take it. Baby C continues to show intermittent diastolic flow (the least-dangerous stage of this very dangerous condition, and the one that buys us the most time), so Dr. Hayes happily wished us “another exceptionally boring day.” The held-breath status…
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Day 5
Gestational age: 28 weeks +1 day A fine day. This morning’s ultrasound (with special guest! famed nurse-charmer, Casey) revealed marginally improved Dopplers for Baby C; at this moment, marginal is monumental. The longer we can bear intermittent or sporadically absent diastolic flow in Baby C’s Dopplers (in other words, if umbilical blood flow is presenting…
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Day 4 – Date Night
We’ve officially crossed into the 28th week of pregnancy and with it leapt into the third trimester, and not a moment too soon. The girls scored an 8 out of 8 on their BPP tests, routinely registered healthy heart beats and reassuringly katate’d the organs of their mother throughout the day. However, Baby C’s diastolic…
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Days 2 and 3
Gestational age: 27 weeks +5 days/+6 days Two more days down in sterile Oz! We have to say this now: Learning that you – you – have navigated here, have read this, and are here at this moment at sea… It is more than words can say. We see a lattice of lighthouses across the…
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Day 1.5
Meghan’s first full hospital day. As expected, it’s a wall-to-wall syllabus of consultations, tests, and monitoring sessions. The medical team is committed to designing a treatment plan that is both comprehensive and measured. The day is a revolving door, but it’s the first, and every new conversation is a puzzle taking shape. By the numbers!…
The Squires Family Five 