Here We Go Again

James went for another surgery follow-up appointment today (and weighed in at 21 lbs exactly on their scale). This puts him back on his own growth curve, which is good. The nutritionist calculated that his recent weight gain (since his last appointment) has been about 10 grams a day, which means that he's doing some "catch-up" growth (10-20 grams a day is catching up instead of just staying on the same curve). So, that was all encouraging.

The nurse practitioner still wants to see him doing better than that, though. The nutritionist gave us a sample of Elecare to try. This is the elemental formula that he was on for a while in the NICU; it's very broken down so it's extremely easy to digest. The idea is that having this (as a supplement to the other things he's eating and drinking) might help him absorb more calories and nutrients. It would be great if that works (although it's crazy expensive -- $50/can, which would be a 2-3 day supply if he were drinking it exclusively). She also gave us some other supplements and recommendations to try out.

The nurse practitioner also wants James to see Peds GI again, just to make sure there's not something we're missing. That doctor will make the call on what to do next, and it sounds like there's a possibility that she may want us to start doing the tube feedings at night again, or, if she doesn't recommend that, the surgeon is comfortable taking out the g-tube at the end of the summer. (Guess which option we're rooting for!)

So, in sum, the nutritionist and the surgeon seemed fine with James's progress, but the nurse practitioner was a bit more concerned. We'd certainly like him to be gaining faster, but it seems like he's so happy and active (and as far as we know doing well with his developmental milestones) that he must be getting energy from somewhere!

We also saw the audiologists because James's hearing aids have been having a lot of feedback. The hearing aids tested fine, so it looks like it's the earmolds (the part that goes into his ear). They made a new set of impressions, and it takes a couple weeks for them to arrive. They also had an ENT resident look in his ear because they saw something they thought might be the start of an infection, but the resident said he was pretty sure it was just wax. Poor James Does Not Like having people look or poke in his ears, and he had to have it done multiple times today! (It took two people to hold him down to get the earmolds made.) Fortunately he was very well-behaved even though all of these appointments were scheduled right during what should have been his naptime.

And in other news, after appearing pretty much fully recovered, Stanley seems to have hurt his back again. It's not bad enough that we have to go to the vet, but he's definitely not walking right and we're giving him his pain meds from last time (which help a lot). Poor little guy!

And our desktop computer hard drive appears to have quite suddenly died on us, and it turns out we haven't backed up our photos in about the past year. Ugh! We're hoping a tech wizard can retrieve them (but if not, we still have the majority of them uploaded to Shutterfly or our favorites here on the blog, so it's not a complete loss). In any case, go back up your computer, now. Learn from the error of our ways!