More Medical

Grandma arrived late last night for a visit -- hooray! Too bad that we had to spend so much of today at doctor's appointments. (Little did I know that the story of our life would turn into a continuing education course in pediatrics.)

First up was the boys' injections for RSV antibodies (Synagis). Next time the nurse offers to let me step outside while they get the shots, I'm going to take her up on it; even though it's such a little thing, it bothers me a lot to see my happy babies suddenly be in pain. (They both got over it much faster than I did.) Before the shots, the doctor was telling us how wonderful this treatment is, and she said something about how it really improved the chances of preemies surviving through their first winter. While I'm sure that's true and that it is a great medicine, I also didn't need to hear something that implied that my children's survival was questionable.

The afternoon was our follow-up visit with Nephrology for both boys. We were hoping that Matthew's blood pressure would be normal and he could come off his medication, but unfortunately, it was high, so they had to increase the dose instead. (They took his BP about five times to be sure.) Bummer! Hopefully he just needs a little more time to grow out of it. They're experimenting with giving him a higher dose of labatalol and dropping the enalapril, so we'll see how that works. James's blood pressure was fine, so they didn't want to make any changes to his meds.

James only weighed eleven pounds at his appointments today, which was disappointing. He's not losing weight, but he hasn't gained weight either over the past week. Of course, he was spitting up a lot during the later part of last week and has been getting slightly lower calorie formula for the early part of this week, so hopefully this is just a temporary blip and he'll get back on his upward trajectory. Matthew was around 11 lbs, 11 oz -- big boy!

We tried bumping up James to the 24 calorie version of the formula, and that didn't work -- he immediately started throwing it up again. So we went back to 20 cal (with no problems), and we'll try to ease our way up gradually to the higher fortification.