11th June: he's doing alright, but going no where fast.

11th June: with all the recent events and the good news we was receiving and viewing, it was nice to see a pathway out. Upon going to the hospital on this day, we was given an even clearer way out and a road map was set out. They wanted to start Oliver on a routine practice called recycling, this is when they take out what's collected in the stoma bag and push it through the bowel that's not currently being used. This helps to get the bowel ready for when it's reconnected post surgery.

Again for us fantastic news, I remember thinking, we can do this, we can win this fight.

They wanted to start the recycling very soon, but only with water to start with and then working up to his fecal waste in his stoma bag. Oliver also had a contrast scan on his bowel, this was to make sure things still looked good.

Also on this day he was having his heart scan, I never liked when they had to do tests, it always felt like an experiment to me. Adding on to this, I was always aprihensive, 9 times out of 10 they would pick something up that was wrong.

So scan done, but they had to foward the images to the consultant, again routine, but it always makes you feel something is wrong.

Also his gas levels in the night had dropped, but he was doing much better in the day.

There was also allot of commotion as they had a new little baby in, and this baby wasn't doing so well.

I'm going to do a digression on this, as this was something that effected me deeply. Not this case in particular, but others going foward.

12th June: due to an unsettled night when I went into see Oliver, they told me that they had put him back onto the high frequency ventilator. This was due to his co2 levels had increased in the night and he just wasn't getting the oxygen he needed. (Reason unknown)

He was given some morphine to help him settle, Oliver always had this way of fighting things. Call it what you want, but I think it was his way of saying I'm fighting daddy. On a slight posotive  he was now on 8.5ml of milk an hour, I'm guessing he was loving it.

It was a wierd process and one I got to help in, so you had to suck out the stuff that was in his stomach via his feeding tube. Then put that over a strip to check the pH/acidity levels, also checking for the colour. White milky was a good sign, dark green was a bad sign. Mostly Olivers was milky but with a slight tinge of green. This did fluctuate on occation, this lead them to either upping or Lowering feeds. 

Anyways after the checks you would have the milk in the syringe and connect this to the feeding tube, hold it up and let gravity do its job. 

I loved being involved in the little jobs such as these, being a hands on father this just made me feel so content I could have an active roll in supporting my son.

Again today, still waiting on the heart scan results.

I was getting more worried as time went on, but I couldn't rush anything. Still didn't help the worry I was feeling.

13th June: After the few set backs with his oxygen and some green stomach waste. His feeds went back down to 5ml, but with hopes to increase this over the day.

Posotive news is that he was taken back of the high frequency ventilator and back on the normal ventilation. It was always 2 steps forward and 1 step back, but by now I would say we wasn't used to it, but just went with it.

Requiring only 27% oxygen, this was good news and he seemed to be back to improving slowly.

He was now a heavy 3lb4oz baby.

14th June: 21-25 % oxygen 

A no news day, again these days were not to be underestimated. No news is good news as they say, so when everything was normal and nothing was changing for the bad, I would say I was happy.

15th June: went in as normal scrubbed up and done all the stuff required to walk into his room and Oliver looked good. He was only on 20-21% oxygen and was on 6ml of milk every hour.

There was also suggestions that because he was doing well, they might try again with the bubble cpap ventilator again, but this would be discussed with the doctors when they done there rounds. 

Over the last few days above, I can only describe my feelings as, content. He wasn't moving so far backwards that it was bad news, but he wasn't at the same time moving foward fast. I guess I didn't want fast, slow and steady wins the race, but i will be honest and say I couldn't wait to get out of the hospital setting and get him home.

Next, we'll this isn't the best news, what is stage 2.