Happy 2 Month-Day

We had a very eventful "monthday" for Carter. I ended up catching a ride on an ambulance to the ER at Duke last night due to a terrible bout of food poisoning. Brad said when the EMTs arrived, I was gray and apparently gray is not my color! We spent the entire night in the ER and after I fell asleep around 4am, Brad went up to visit Carter--what a surprise to the nurse to see him at that hour. He said Carter was laughing and dancing, so apparently he's become a night owl (thanks to nurse Lindzie playing with him all night), which is going to be great since I work night shifts and need to sleep during the day.

Carter's doing well. He's down to a very low level on the morphine, which should be completely off tomorrow and then he'll have his PICC line removed. He's just recently started showing some withdrawal signs, mostly as snit-fits (as nurse Shanda calls them) during which he goes from smiling baby to pissed off baby in a matter of seconds. He cries, turns red, lips turn blue, breaks out in a cold sweat, throws his arms back and holds his breath. He's still pretty hoarse, so his cries are pitiful. He looks like he's screaming his head off, but all you hear is a little "heh" noise. Typical baby temper-tantrum mulitiplied by a hundred because of the withdrawals. It takes us about 30 minutes to get him to calm down and then he sleeps for a few hours. We're so thankful that he wasn't experiencing this type of withdrawal all along. He's being given meds to take the edge off the withdrawals, but it's just something that he's going to have to outgrow. For right now, we're trying to limit visitors and stimulation so he can stay calm.

He's "eating" 92 mL (just over 3 ounces) every 3 hours through his NG tube. Speech, OT and PT haven't been able to do much therapy this week because of the snit-fits, but we're hoping we can get the ball rolling next week on oral feeds. He's also a champ at filling up that diaper!

Elizabeth, from Breath of Hope, has a website on which she features CDH kids. Carter is currently the featured baby and you can check him out at: http://facesofcdhawareness.blogspot.com/

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