UTI

The urine culture came back positive -- James has a urinary tract infection. (Little did we know we should have been giving him cranberry juice along with his formula.) The antibiotics they've already been giving him treat whichever bacteria it is (the nurse mentioned which one, but I don't remember it), so that's good. And UTIs can cause intestinal slowdowns, so it's possible that his feeding intolerance this time around was a consequence of the infection. (It would be good to do the GI studies to make sure nothing else is going on, though, and as far as we know they're still planning that for tomorrow AM.)

If you are eating I'd recommend skipping the next paragraph.

Today they've been doing "irrigation" of his colon -- putting saline into his ostomy opening every two hours to help clean the poop out. It seems to be working to get some poop out, which is good, but it's also apparently having the very disturbing (to us) side effect of also pushing the poop out the other way. Specifically, he has a replogle tube in which suctions out his stomach; they put this in to try to reduce the belly distention and make him more comfortable. He's had it several times before, and I've developed a hatred for it, mostly because while it serves a useful purpose, it often makes James gag and it sometimes seems to irritate his stomach (it moves around and can stick to or scrape against the stomach lining). But today after the irrigations, they've been seeing what looks like poop coming out the replogle -- so I'm grateful that it's contained in a tube rather than having him vomit it up. Either way, I hate that my baby has to go through this. If I understand correctly, though, the doctors actually seem to think that this is somewhat encouraging, because the irrigation is providing enough pressure to go through the whole intestine.