Day 7

When we got down to the NICU today, we found that Emma was back on dopamine. She managed to go 12 hours without peeing again. She finally peed at 3:00 pm today, this was a big relief to Eric and me. Dr. Roa told us that he thought she may have sepsis. He explained that with the sepsis, her kidneys would shut down, her oxygen requirements would go up and it could be the explanation on why her cells were not producing on their own. They went ahead and got some blood for cultures to see if she had bacteria in her blood. The results would be back in about 24 hours and they would be able to identify the infection and treat her with the proper antibiotics. At this time, they started a few diffent ones for precautionary reasons. Because they were suspecting she has an infection, they stopped her little drops of breast milk. She could basically get a rotten gut (NEC) from getting food and not being able to digest it. This was serious and required surgical intervention, so the decision to stop the feedings was easy. Dr. Roa also mentioned possibly having to take out her UVC and PICC line, as these could be two easy hosts for bacteria. He then mentioned surgically placing a central line. This is sort of like the PICC line but it is tunneled under the skin and can be kept for a long time. They will also be able to draw labs from the line, so again, she will not need to be stuck for labs and her blood gases. The problems with inserting the central line are one, if she has an infection they have to wait until she is being treated with antibiotics for at least 72 hours and two, they do not do any surgeries at Mease so she would have to be transferred. This was something that he told Eric and I to think about; our choices were St. Josephs (preferred by Mease) or All Children's (preferred by us). The choice was simple, if she had to be transferred, she was going to go to All Children's Hopsital in St. Petersburg. We would sleep on it and hope in the morning there would be no infection and no talk about transferring her.