Today marks day 14 in the life of Cooper Davies. The first two weeks haven't quite been the start we had planned on but it certainly has been eventful. A routine 36 week prenatal exam ended up landing us in the hospital under constant monitoring until the day Coop ended up being born.
Cooper was born on September 2nd, 2010 at 8:57am weighing in at 7lbs and measuring 18.5" long - not bad for a baby born 3 weeks early! Unfortunately his lungs were not quite as ready as the rest of him so after a brief few moments with mom and dad in the operating room he went to the NICU. The first few hours they had him on a cannula (the thing that blows air into your nose) and were just monitoring him to see how his lungs were doing. I was very motivated to get down there to see and hold him so only a couple hours after the surgery I pulled myself out of bed and into a wheel chair to get down to see him. At that point they had him in an oxygen hood which measures the amount of additional O2 they are giving to him. He looked very angelic sleeping in that and we called him out little astronaut. It was really hard not to be able to hold him but he looked ok and was sleeping peacefully. Later that night they had him back on the nose cannula which meant my opportunity to hold him. So I got myself out of bed onto my feet and made my way down to his room (very slowly and painful but nothing would stop me!). I finally got my skin on skin cuddle time with my new son - best feeling ever!!
The next day things took a turn for the worse as overnight they had to put him on a ventilator as his breathing was not getting better. This was very hard to see and we couldn't hold him. A few days later we had a wonderful moment with him, he was laying there with eyes open looking at us. Despite the ventilator tube down his throat he was remarkably calm. Holding his hand and looking into his eye like that was a moment I will never forget - the word love doesn't even begin to describe what I felt for him. After that it seems like each day he steadily improved, he got off the ventilator and moved to a high flow nasal cannula (which was basically a force of wind blowing up his nose). That lasted a few days and then he was just on a regular cannula which they were decreasing the flow on each day.
On Sunday morning he came off of everything, well except the monitors and we were starting to really get excited about getting him home in the next few days (would have been a week and a half since he was born) but he ended up having a few more breathing difficulties and went back onto the O2. It was really hard feeling like we were taking steps back instead of forward but in the end we want him to be healthy and 100% when we do take him home so we knew in the end it was the best.
So now, two weeks after he was born we are hoping to do another test run at being off of all O2 support and watching for a few more days to see how he does. We have fingers crossed that he sails right thru and we will be taking him home by the weekend. It will certainly be a day to celebrate when we finally get home and feel like we can all finally start being a family, together in our own home rather than this roller coaster we have been on.
