Setbacks

We had a little setback with Hannah on Friday evening....her temperature dropped and the doctors decided to put her back in her incubator. They ran a bunch of tests on her to see if she might have had an infection (preemies drop their temperature with infection, instead of "spiking" a fever), but all of the tests came back negative. I'm thinking that it was just the stress of her eye exam on Friday afternoon (and the nurses agree that could be the case).

As a result, she now has to be weaned out of the incubator again, and the temperature adjustments have to be done in small increments over a long period of time. Starting on Wednesday afternoon last week during rounds, the doctors had all been talking about sending her home over the weekend (even on Friday) -- so long as she did well off her oxygen (which she did!), but now that she had to go back in her incubator, it will be a while yet. It is typical for preemies to have small setbacks as they learn to do everything necessary to go home.....but typically it is with eating and breathing. Since Hannah was doing so great with those things, we let ourselves get a little too excited about her impending arrival at home.

We're hopeful/optimistic that she'll be able to come home sometime this week because Jon has to go back to work next Monday (March 3rd). Unfortunately, his school system required his 6 weeks of parental leave to start when Hannah was born. We'd hoped that he could take 2 weeks with me at the beginning and then work until she came home and take the rest, but they told us that wasn't a possibility. I'm sure that when the contract was written no one ever considered the fact that the baby would be in the hospital the whole parental leave.

Please keep Hannah in your prayers to continue to grow stronger so she can come home and please keep her parents in your prayers that we can be patient in this process and know that God will allow her to come home when she is ready.