Day 7 - Insurance Woes (but at least no baby woes, so that's good)

Today marked his first week out of the womb and makes him officially 30 weeks! He is growing so much and doing so well. His updates are few, he successfully got a PICC line inserted and got to lose the hand and feet IVs giving his little limbs more mobility to move around and less bruising. We are happy for him because even though it was tough to get the PICC line in (3 separate tries totally 5 pokes before they got it with rests in between tries), the hand and feet IVs are known for only lasting a couple of hours and at most a full day before they come out and he needs to be pricked again. The PICC line will be with him until he graduates to not needing IVs at all.

If he settles pretty well with the PICC Line and his x-ray tomorrow morning looks good, he'll be getting extubated. The x-ray to see if the PICC line was in properly today showed that a small portion of his lung had collapsed (probably just from his positioning) and they upped his respiratory pressure to help expand it. They want to make sure that resolves before they remove the tube.

On an un-Milo related note: Shelly and I both had very long and stressful phone calls with our insurance providers. I was trying to make sure my insurance would cover dental work for me here in Portland since I had a bit of a dental emergency I wanted to take care of here and Shelly was trying to get the pump we were promised in Medford to be transferred so we could pick it up here in Portland. Both tasks were arduous and involved a lot of phone calls to places that ask you to hold before anyone even answers. I made some progress on getting dental coverage here but no progress on getting the pump covered by insurance.

Also an annoyance in our life, our GPS can't seem to get a handle on Portland streets meaning that every time we drive, we are routed on paths that don't possibly seem like they can be the quickest path including several paths where we double back the way we came and multiple opportunities for wrong turns. This was especially frustrating as I tried to navigate alone to my dentist appointment (already running late) and ended up going North instead of South on I5 because my GPS was just a couple of seconds late on telling me which fork to take. On the bright side, the dentist called and said they we were rescheduling for the next day since my insurance hadn't been switched over yet (my current insurance will not cover work in Portland but they were able to transfer me over to a different service that would cover it but it was not active in time for today's appointment).

1 week old today!

They laminated his footprint for us

The name tag that hangs on his bed