The weights for Rory have been kind of confusing over the last few days. After my last post, the next weigh-in came in at 5lbs 7.4oz (or something like that) which was still a gain over her admission weight, but not a really good gain. Yesterday she was weighed early in the morning while I was asleep in her room, and they say they removed her clothes and diaper but the weight was impossibly high (5lbs 11.7oz) so I asked them to do it again. The second weigh-in came out to more like 5lbs 9oz, which was nice to see. This morning she's 5lbs 9.7oz, so the trend is starting to look good, finally! The last x-ray, a few days ago, did not show significant improvement in the shrinking of the dilated portion of her bowel, though, and there is still a lingering high white blood count.

We are running out of time for her to demonstrate that she can get by without the two-step operation. If she does not continue to gain enough weight and keeps getting low-grade infections or if her bowel doesn't shrink down significantly more, then the doctors will want to do a colostomy soon (because they will feel that the hirshsprung's is the reason that she is not thriving/improving and waiting longer will do no good, and they can't do the one-step yet b/c her dilated area of bowel is not contracted enough to do that operation yet.) If that's the case, they will probably operate on Monday and she will have a colostomy for 6 ot 8 weeks, then they will do the other surgery to connect the colon back to the correct port. If she is improving a lot over the next few days then they may consider delaying the surgery for a bit to see if she can improve enough so that the one-step surgery can be attempted. There is still a chance that if they attempt the one-step surgery that they will not be able to do it - if the colon turns out to still be a little too big, or if they cannot pull it out far enough, for instance, they will still need to do the colostomy and go that route. There is not a big difference in outcome in the long term with the two-step vs the one-step, but the one-step at least avoids a second surgery and 6-8 weeks of colostomy care. So we hope that she will show great improvement over the next few days.

Angela finally got a break from the hospital - I spent the night last night after she stayed there for 3.5 days straight! We will try to alternate nights now that my mom is staying here to help with Alex (Angela can't be here alone with Alex b/c she can't supervise a toddler while she is pumping.) We don't get much sleep at the hospital typically, so it's a relief to spend a night here.