Echo, echo, echo.

So far so good this week. I know it's only Tuesday, but we'll take what we can get. I think all the doctors and nurses are scared of having to prick her for anything (ivs, blood draws, etc) because of how much of a pain I was to them last week. So they've left her alone. OK, so it could also just be a coincidence.

They redid the echo on her heart yesterday and found no improvement in her heart function (the squeezing). BUT they also found it hasn't gotten worse. So they gave her another round of immunoglobulin (also called ivig) treatment. Apparently this kind of treatment can take a while and may need to be repeated multiple times before it helps. Hopefully this causes an uptick in her echo. One of the frustrating things about all this is that the cardiologists have made it clear that the echo is a horrible way of determining if heart squeezing is ok. They told us they look at the before and after pics and make an educated guess. Woo. Sometimes I just wish there was a machine that gave a thumbs up or thumbs down so we had a clearer status.

Our NP Rebecca also came by again yesterday to change Molly's wound vac. She said her wound was "superficial" at this point, which is awesome. It's also amazing what they consider superficial because her chest still has a big gaping hole in it from what I saw. She's keeping the vac on the wound for now just because we're stuck here anyway and might as well keep it on as long as possible.

The depressing part is that she said she'd send us home now with how good it looks. But we're here until the squeezing problem improves. Hopefully this round of ivig does something.

Otherwise Molly's energy is improving. She's gaining weight, working on getting all her food by mouth and is awake for longer these days.

And some more recent pics:

A better shot of her "NICU Special" haircut. Yes, it's this way on both sides.

Someone's hungry.

In the hat that nurse Naomi knit her. Ridiculous.

Another in a series of cute hand placements while sleeping.

An xray showing her pacemaker. The large circular piece is the battery/computer. The two leads going off of it go up to her heart where the 4 circles are the leads screwed (yes, screwed) into her heart. The lead wires are so long so she can grow taller without it having to be replaced. The other wires are just her monitors that she had on her chest when the xray was taken.