A Sigh of Relief

We got good news this morning.  The results of the babies' 4 weeks of life head ultrasounds both came back normal.  We expected this outcome for Lucas, as both his other ultrasounds were normal.  For
Olivia, the doctors had seen a small bleed on her one week of life ultrasound and so were following its progress, or more accurately and luckily, its lack of progress.  Babies can have bleeds from level 1 (basically normal) to level 4 (serious).  The doctors were watching two spots in Olivia, a level 1 and level 2.  Although they never seemed particularly concerned - when reading the results of her 2 week check-up screen, the fellow told me that she could definitely still go to Swarthmore - it is pretty scary when the doctors are watching something in your daughter's brain.  So it was pretty great today when the follow-up report came back as "stable", which as the fellow and resident assured me meant I could stop holding my breath.   She will get an MRI before release, which is pretty standard for preemies, but otherwise she's done with head scans.

If you're a frequent blog reader, you may wonder if you missed the earlier posts about her other head scans. In fact, we haven't posted about it.  I think there were two things going on: one, we both wanted to wait until everything resolved itself before sharing and two, we felt some instinct to protect our friends and family from what we saw as one of the scarier experiences, at least in the sense that if there had been something more serious going on, it could have been harder to resolve through medical treatment.  It's a bit of a funny instinct for two people writing a blog about their children in the NICU to try and protect our readers from elements of our experience.  Out of necessity we are learning how to handle whatever is in front of us, and our sense of what is medically serious and what is not has definitely shifted dramatically over the past 4 1/2 weeks, but I think we are still wanting to be a bit gentler on delivery to the rest of our loved ones who are not spending every day in the nursery.  I think it also helps us to believe that everything is going to be ok, even on the days when we're scared.

So today we are coming clean.  Olivia had one concerning (at least to a parent) head ultrasound, and she's had two really positive follow up scans.  It was pretty scary on the days we were waiting for the scan results to come back, but we were mostly able to put it out of mind the rest of the time.  And we promise you that we are not holding back on anything else.  Our babies are both doing wonderfully.  Not every minute is perfect or easy, but a lot of them are, thanks in no small part to the wonderful doctors who help assuage our concerns with their experience and faith in our babies' development.  As we watch Lucas and Olivia grow - as they are doing wonderfully, up to 3lbs 3oz (Lucas) and 2lbs 15 oz (Olivia) today - we are so impressed with their strength and resilience, and hope that we can be as much of an inspiration and gift to them as they are to us.