Asher Update

Asher has made some improvements in the past day. Our pediatrician asked the neonatologist yesterday to take a look at him and see if there was anything she recommended. She noticed that Asher's increasing episodes started 6 days after his caffeine was discontinued, and caffeine takes up to 5 days to leave your system. The caffeine has been used since birth to stimulate their respiratory drive, but Asher's was discontinued a while back because "most" premies outgrow the need for it by 40-44 weeks and Asher was about 41.5 weeks at that point (Nolan's was discontinued a couple weeks before that with no issue; Asher was also tried then too but started having increased episodes right away so they restarted him quickly).

Well as with everything else, when has Asher done ANYTHING like "most" preemies? Never. That boy is on his own schedule. However, anytime he does something out of the ordinary it is concerning that his brain injury is playing a role. For the time being the caffeine seems to be helping things and I am trying not to get too worked up worrying what happens next time they discontinue him. Is this a long term problem because of his bleed, or is he just taking longer than most because that's how he works? The uncertainty of all of this doesn't get any easier to tolerate even though we've been at it for 4 months.  Anyway, hopefully within the next few days Asher can get back to normal and start using oxygen again only for feeds, but we'll see how it goes. As for Nolan, why he is still needing oxygen is unknown.

I'm done trying to figure those two out.