May 16

Today May is continuing to recover from his surgery. The rate of his recovery is still moving in the right direction, but not as much advance as yesterday. His CO₂ is 54% - a little higher than last night's 43% - but still not alarming. He's only needing 33% oxygen supply this morning, so that's another good sign. They're going to start cutting back on the meds that are keeping him groggy. They need him to wake up a little bit because he's starting to get lazy with the ventilator and let it do all the work breathing for him. To keep him out of pain while he starts to regain consciousness, they'll give him morphine.

Hopefully they'll begin Pedialyte via his feeding tube to start preparing him to get back off of the intravenous TPN feeding. If Pedialyte works OK, they'll begin to slowly ramp up milk again.

Max's bilirubin levels are down to 14.0!!

Normal bilirubin is between 5-16. This is one of the first "normal" things we've seen since he was born. It's a sign that his liver is healing and the CMV infection may be in the final stages of going dormant (CMV never actually leaves the body).

Now we can begin to focus on the heart defect. There is no electrocardiogram scheduled for today yet. They're doing them on an "as needed" basis.

We'll leave the PVL brain injury an thyroid anomaly to worry about for another day.

Here's another photo from this morning. You can see the surgery dressing on the left side of his back. They went into the heart from under his left scapula.