Sleepy Claire Bear

Yesterday was the first day in which the visitor restriction was lifted at Children's hospital. Mandi's family had a chance to meet baby Claire, some for the first time. I was the proud papa showing off my little girl. Mandi answered a lot of questions pertaining to what this and that cord and tube does. Colton was super excited to see his baby sister and said "I want to pet her" and "I want to hold her." Of course, I forgot the video camera in the car so we were unable to capture this moment in electronic form. It will be embedded into our memories for a life time.

Claire started to prepare for her CT Scan and New IV around 1:00. Little did we know that this next process would send baby Claire into a little set back. She was intubated for the procedure and placed on sedatives to prevent her from moving during these important scans and procedures. We left for dinner with my parents and both of us expected to return from Planks Cafe to an awake and alert Claire Bear ready to give her the first bottle she had received in days. Unfortunately, this was not the case. She was not breathing on her own yet, in fact, the Doctors had to increase the respiration rate with the ventilator to help get her ph level back to baseline numbers. We continued to wait at the hospital into the early night. In addition, we got word that her white blood cell counts were up which indicates the possibility of infection. It was super difficult to leave the hospital last night not knowing when our little baby was going to be able to breath on her own. Something extremely uncomfortable about the necessity of a machine to breath for your baby. We are glad for the technology but hope that we do not need it much longer.

All that said, we found out this morning that her first heart surgery has been pushed back until early next week because of these factors. The NICU waiting game continues...

We hope that baby Claire can start to breath on her own sometime today so we can start to get some food in her and prepare her for her first surgery next week.

We appreciate your thoughts and prayers.