What a big boy!

(two pictures from when Colby was 5 weeks old. He had grown a bit from birth at that time and has certainly grown more since)


It's absolutely amazing how quickly things change with Colby. And it's just as amazing how that plays with our emotions, pushing and pulling us as he has good times and bad.

I found Colby wide awake, squirming around and looking great yesterday when I went to see him. He weighs about 3 pounds 12 ounces now and just looks good. He's lost that "preemie" look to his body and looks more like a little baby now. His head is large, at least I think so. I asked the doctors if he'll catch up to the larger head from his hydrocephalus. Dr Casey said that if the hydrocephalus stays under control, his jaw and face will eventually catch up to the rest of his head. That's important to me. You never want your child to be stared at or teased and unfortunately, I can see that if he had an abnormal looking head that kids would target him for teasing.

Colby's last IV is out of his hand. So now he has everything going through his Broviac like, a very thick IV like tube that goes into his thigh into his bloodstream. He still has a tube that goes into his belly and sucks out any acid or backup that he has as he isn't being fed. The doctors think they may be able to take that out before too long.

All was well until Colby started breathing very fast, sometimes as fast at 90 breaths a minute. And his heart rate was fast too, up around 200 at times. You could see that he was having trouble breathing when you watched his stomach and chest. His whole body heaved as he would try to breath. Then he began to cry and nothing soothed him. He's been on the humidified cannula for a couple days now and we were worried that his body was getting tired. We called the doctors over. They cleared some junk out of his nose, but that didn't help him. I was torn because I had an appointment way down by the shore that I had to make. So Tracey stayed at the hospital and called me to update me on the happenings. Unfortunately you need to leave Colby in good hands at times. There's nothing I could do if I stayed. The doctors were tending to him. Tracey was there. And I need to keep my appointments. If I cancelled every time Colby had an issue, I would probably need to miss 1/2 of my appointments.

After some assessment, Dr Casey thought he might have been in pain as it's only been a week since his surgery. So they gave him some morphine and this did the trick. He slowly calmed down and his heart rate and breathing came closer to normal. I wrapped up my appointment around 6pm and headed back up 91 to the hospital to see him. Colby was doing much better. His heart rate and breathing back to where they should be. Around 8:00 last night, Colby started to wake up a bit and was more peaceful and content. The doctors said they would monitor his pain throughout the night and help him if they saw he was hurting.


We'll see how long he needs to stay on the morphine. Our next milestones are getting him to start eating. Once he can do that the doctors have said they'll move him into the next room which is the next step to coming home.

Some people ask what the hardest part about all of this is. I'd have to say it's changing your outlook. Once we found out we were pregnant, Tracey and I would talk about the future....having twins running around the house. Who would walk first? What would thier first words be? I always thought it would be "daddy". haha Daycare...how would be do that? I even thought about being at their school and hearing two "Reeds", one after the other getting their deplomas. But things change and there's nothing you can do about it. Sometimes I'm shocked when I think about how different our life is now. We now wonder IF Colby will walk...or IF he will talk. Depending on who you talk to, we hear either that a grade 3 brain bleed with Hydrocephalus is either devistating, or not too bad. Nobody can tell us what Colby's outcome will be. That by far is the hardest thing emotionally for me. Just not knowing. This just solidifies our belief that we need to be happy for all that we do have and simply make the best of all that we cannot change.

The eye doctor came in yesterday and no change in his eyes. So at this point, Colby still has state 2 ROP. Colby's head was a tad lower than the day prior. His head now measures 33 cm's around.


I'm afraid I didn't bring the camera in yesterday. But I'll do so today.