Update for Tuesday, March 8

I visited with Katherine for a few hours today. She has reached a new milestone - she had a change in her feeding program. Instead of a continuous, slow drip of food into her stomach, today she moved to a bolus feeding program where her food is sent to her stomach (via a tube through her mouth to her stomach) in one batch over one hour. She gets fed this way now every three hours, which more closely matches how normal babies eat - in a full / empty cycle. We also finally got the results this evening from her heart ultrasound. She has persistent pulmonary stenosis (PPS) which is very common in pre-term infants. As I understand it, when a full-term baby is born, there is an opening in the blood vessel between the aorta and the pulmonary artery that automatically closes within the first few days after birth. In Katherine, her body is still maturing, and at 30 weeks adjusted age (10 more weeks until her original due date), her blood vessels have not grown enough to meet her increased blood supply, therefore the opening between the aorta and the pulmonary artery has not yet grown closed. They say this condition is not serious, and will correct itself as she grows and the blood vessels get bigger. That's all there is to report today.