Thursday, July 30th Update

Shortly after Cooper was born we had a conversation with our nurse where she told us, "With a baby in the NICU there will be good days and there will be bad days."  She was preparing us for the inevitable reality that was to become our lives.  Unfortunately, today was not one of Cooper's best performances.
The Brady episodes that he has been experiencing over the last couple of days peaked in frequency today.  During these episodes his heart rate and oxygenation levels will suddenly plummet and he requires stimulation, usually a vigorous chest rub, to remind him to start breathing again as his heart rate returns to normal.  By the time we had left the hospital Cooper had experienced 17 Brady episodes.  Needless to say, this was a stressful day spent with eyes glued to a monitor in anticipation of a decreasing heart rate.  We are quite tired.
That is the bad news, and I'm happy to have it out of the way.
The better news is that by the day's end Cooper had begun to do better.  The new theory as to why he is experiencing these episodes with increasing frequency is because he was working to hard to breathe.  Cooper had been the NICU stud over the past weeks, constantly surprising people with how well he was breathing and he progressed from breathing tubes to nose prongs to nearly breathing on his own at a very fast rate.  While he did really well for a couple of days without the ventilator, it takes a lot of energy to breathe when one is as small as he is.  These Brady episodes are Cooper's way of telling us that he is tired and would like some help.  So he was moved back onto a ventilator in the early evening, and he is already showing signs of improvement.  He did have a couple more episodes, but they were farther apart and less severe than they had been earlier.  Hopefully these will become a rare occasion as he regains his strength over the next couple of days.
That the problem is in the process of being resolved is the better news, but it is not the best news.  The best news is that our little man gained 50 grams today!  That's right, Cooper is back up to his birth weight of 1060 grams.  The doctors have made some changes in his feeds that should help him to keep gaining weight, so we're getting pretty excited to see what Cooper looks like with some meat on his bones.
Although today was stressful, we are all doing okay.  We are blessed that Cooper is in the capable hands of his nurses, doctors, and a loving God. We trust that things will get keep getting better as we travel down this road, even if we hit a few potholes along the way.

-Taylor