Chickens, Cats and Hummingflys

Toni and Ty came down to visit us for the weekend and are here now, so I am going to keep this short and sweet. It was a pretty uneventful day in the NICU - which is a good thing! Naya had another good night last night, great stats, good amounts of pee and general stability. I still can't get over how good she looks compared to Monday. I am definitely not used to how tiny she is. So fragile looking now, like how a newborn should look I suppose. The doctors were very happy with her progess this week and started talking about goals for next week with weening more meds and making other adjustments. It is very nice to hear them talk about the future and long term. Such a change. She was given another blood transfusion this afternoon and they had to ween her blood pressure meds quite a bit during it. They were able to keep them at lower levels afterward, which was very exciting. It seems like her heart is finally getting stronger, as she is able to sustain a gradual decrease of meds. They have finally figured out that she prefers these adjustments to be made slowly and it's definitely helping her.

Her lungs are a different story, as they are still quite sick and she is on a lot of support via the ventilator. Unfortunately, the only medicine for her lungs at this point is time. They are slowly going down on vent settings but nothing very significant. I hope that her lungs start making improvements soon as that as the key to her recovery. Again, I think it's going to have to be similar to heart with slow and gradual adjustments being key. I hope that that is what I will be talking about a lot next week. I feel in my heart that we are finally moving in that direction.

Before I go, I should probably explain the title of this entry so everyone doesn't think I've completely lost it. (Dan would probably disagree with that statement.) Everyday when we walk back to the Ronald McDonald House, we pass a parking lot across from the hospital. In the morning, there are chickens roaming around this parking lot. At night, there are multiple cats hanging out in the entry way to this parking lot. In the afternoon, there are weird, gigantic dinosaur-sized flys buzzing next to this parking lot. (Seriously, these flies look like a hummingbird and a dragonfly mated and this is their creation.) Dan and I are still trying to figure out what the hell is going on this particular parking lot but my theory is that these chickens and cats are guarding the entry to some weird world that the hummingflies escaped from. That, or it's proof that everything in Hollywood is weird, even their chickens, cats and insects.