Patent ductus arteriosus

When we went to visit Jack last night, we were told that apparently he's got something called patent ductus arteriosus (pda). That means that there's a little flap in his heart, a doorway of sorts, that hasn't closed yet, and it is fairly common in preemies. They're giving him a medicine called indomethacin, in 3 doses, and are confident it should work. They've already given him the first dose. Twelve hours after the first dose, they give the second, and then 12 hours after that, the third. After THAT, they wait 12 more hours and do an echocardiogram to see if he's still got the heart murmur that is indicative of this. So we should know how it worked by the end of the weekend, if my math is still good. If it doesn't work, then they'll do the entire medicine regime again, and worst case scenario, there's a surgery they can do that's relatively simple that can fix it. It's still heart surgery, but they've pretty much perfected that one. Understandably, we're hoping it's fixed way before we get to looking at the surgery.

On the upside, his respirator is still set to a lower setting. He's been moved down from 40 to 30, and then down to 19 breaths per minute, and he's still doing really good with that. They did move his oxygen mix back up to about 24% up from the 21% that is normal air, but that's to help along with the medicine that he's getting. Overall he's still doing really great.