Ruby Hope McKee Starling

Lets start with the weekend.  Our good friends Laura, Joe, Frances, and Jim threw Ruby a party on Saturday afternoon.  We packed up all of our hand sanitizer and went Laura's house for some fun.  Ruby got to meet a lot of her adoring fans. She also seems pretty interested in the fact that she's on a cake.

The party was the big excitement until yesterday morning.  Ruby went for a swallow study, upper GI, and chest x-ray.  It was long morning of tests for everyone especially Ruby.  The swallow study consisted of me feeding Ruby a bottle with barium formula in it while pictures were taken.  Ruby did OK and ended up taking 20 ml from bottle during the study.  A speech therapist and radiologist were present during the test.  She isn't aspirating or having trouble swallowing.  She is just having trouble establishing  a good rhythm of suck, swallow, breath.  She did start to get a bit tachypnic during the study and the speech therapist seemed a little surprised by it.  I had to explain to her that that was normal and it was probably time to stop with the bottle.  I'm starting to wonder if maybe Ruby just isn't ready respiratory wise to get rid of the tube.  After the swallow study they did the upper GI.  Thankfully they put the rest of the formula through her tube.  The radiologist did see her reflux during the UGI.  From what I understand, we didn't learn anything we didn't already know.  We did rule some things out which is good. 

Finally after those two tests it was time the x-ray.  Ruby handled the the first two test really well.  She didn't like being held down and she fused but not bad.  This was the first x-ray we've had done since she left the NICU.  We've never had one when she wasn't at least slightly sedated.  Since she wasn't sedated they had to put her in this tube thing, that looked like some sort of  torture device.  At this point Ruby flat out lost it.  She screamed louder than her morphine wean days.  Luckily the x-ray didn't take long.  In less than 2 minutes she was out and in my arms.  From Chris and I's uneducated glance at the films it looks like she has not re herniated.  We get another x-ray at 9 months just to make sure.  Since she does have a patch her chances are a little higher that she will reherniate.  We all want to catch it early if it does happen.

After her busy morning Ruby took a long nap and even went to bed early.  Which was good becasue our friend came over and babysat Ruby for a couple hours while we went out.  Today is our 7th wedding anniversary.  Seven years ago today Chris and I were in Hawaii getting married.  It was nice to be able to get out last night have dinner together, even if we hurried through it to  get home to Ruby.