Baby Steps

Marcy and I have learned a lot about human development in the past couple of weeks since the boys were born. Here are a few things I thought you all might find interesting.

• Babies are single minded developers. Their little bodies are so small and the available energy needed for development is so rare that their bodies will only use the energy to develop a single system at a time. If they are having heart trouble, for example, their bodies will work on that system before moving on to “less essential” systems like stomach and bowels.
• 40 weeks isn’t just a random number. The complex systems put in place by God truly are miraculous and they take time to develop. Babies really do need every second of those 40 weeks to get ready to exist in the outside world. Our babies were born at 32 weeks meaning that there are sill 8 weeks of development that need to occur in their bodies and minds before they are truly ready to begin the process of growth and development as babies.
• Weight doesn’t matter. You might think that the babies small size and weight are a factor but they really aren’t important in and of themselves. An underweight baby can still go home with Mommy and Daddy as long as they reach certain developmental goals.
• Time is the hardest thing to give. As parents, your instincts tell you that babies need human contact and nurturing. This is true of a fully developed baby. Fully developed babies like to be rocked and cuddled and sang to. Preemie babies don’t have those same needs. What they need most is sleep. That means that right now the best thing for us to do is not be with the babies most of the time and that separation can be hard.

In the NICU, there is the critical area where the babies are watched over by a nurse at all times. When the babies become a little more stable, they are moved to another area in the NICU called Baby Steps. In this area, one nurse might look after four or five babies at a time. Thursday, we received word that the boys had been moved to Baby Steps. This is certainly progress.

When Can They Come Home?

This is the number one question that I get asked and the one I simply do not have an answer to. What I can tell you is the plan for the boys. As soon as they meet these goals we will have a better understanding of when they will be coming home.

Body Temperature: Alexander still does not have enough body fat and muscle to keep him warm. His body temperature is still too low. He is currently sleeping in what they call an “isolet” which is this plastic aquarium like structure that is heated to keep his body temperature up. Until he can maintain his own body temperature, he cannot come home.

Food: This is the biggest struggle right now. Before they teach the babies how to drink milk from a bottle, they have to make sure that the babies’ stomachs can digest the milk and that their renal and digestive systems are all in working order. To do this, they are administering food through a tube that runs directly into the stomach. Once some food is given, they reverse the process and find out how much of the milk they put in is still sitting there. This tells them how well the babies are handling the feeds.

Neither one of the boys seems to be progressing well down this path. They are both on what is called "continuous feeds", which is where the milk is delivered in a constant drip into the stomach over a continuous period of time (like four hours at a time). This is not ideal, but it provides the food necessary to the body while allowing the system to digest a little at a time as it finishes developing.

Anthony had a setback this past weekend. His stomach slowed down on digesting his milk and it starting coming back up his esophagus (they call it “reflux”). This caused his throat to instinctively close off to keep him from aspirating the milk and he would just quit breathing for stretches of time. This causes his oxygen levels and heart rate to drop off suddenly (to the alarm of his Mother). For this reason, he is back on oxygen until they can get the feed levels right.

The goal, obviously, is for the babies to be able to take a large amount of milk at one time and be able to process it completely before the next feeding. Once the babies can do this, they will start “nippling” which means they will feed them through a tube while giving them a nipple to suck on. This will teach them the connection between a nipple and a full belly. Once they are nippling well, then comes the time when they will be drinking from a bottle only. Once they are able to drink at least eight ounces of milk a day from a bottle and keep it down, they will be just about ready to come home.

Wait and Pray

So, that is where we are. We go and see the babies every day. There are a few hours a day that the babies have “touch time”. This is the time, in between stretches of well needed sleep, that the babies can be picked up, held, have their diapers changed, etc. We visit during these touch times and do as much as we can to feel like part of the process.

The truth is that there is nothing we can do at this point but pray and wait patiently as their little bodies develop one little baby step at time.

They're Heeeere....

Time Flies

You know how on movies, they make big jumps in time simply by fading out and then fading in with some kind of text hoving over the screen that says something like: Four Years Later...

Same thing happened here. You see, Marcy was hospitalized before Thanksgiving and has been languishing in the hospital room ever since. It was the most boring two months ever and therefore not worth our valuable blogging time. So, last time we spoke, it was Halloween, right? Okay, go ahead and fade out the camera.

Two Months Later...

Marcy was told when the babies were a mere 27 weeks in "the oven" that she was in danger of going into labor if she was not careful. So she was careful and held onto those little suckers for another five weeks.

The major problem rested with the baby that the doctor's had dubbed "Baby A". We later named him Alexander Wayne. Alexander had a problem with his umbilical cord. Apparently an umbilical cord has two veins and an artery. One of his two veins was blocked and therefore restricting the blood flow from Mommy. This caused several problems: One was that his placenta was wearing out much faster than his brother's. Another problem was that his growth was slowing down considerably. By the time he was born, he weighed only 2 lbs, 11 oz compared with his bigger brother "Baby B" which we named Anthony Shane.

At 32 and a half weeks gestation, Marcy went into active labor and the decision was made to let the babies be born. A Cesarean was scheduled for that night and on the evening of December 23rd, two new Bryant boys entered the world.

NICU

The babies are, as of this writing, still residents of Medical Center of Plano in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (or just NICU for the hip and funky). Anthony was on a ventilator for the first couple of days but is off now and breathing on his own.


Alexander, although smaller, seems to be in better shape at birth. He came out with his dukes raised and his lungs filled and screaming. He never had to go on the ventilator at all and is breathing just fine on his own.

They are also both now off of their IVs. The only tubes they have now are the ones that are placing the milk into their bellies. Once their little stomachs can handle the milk, we will begin trying to help them learn how to suck on a bottle while still breathing (which is a pretty tough trick for a little baby to learn and is one of the last instincts to develop). But in recent days we have been able to hold them a few times. They are so tiny and perfect. Enjoy the images:

Me holding Alexander

Maw Maw holding Anthony

Marcy holding Alexander

Granddad holding Alexander

By the way, I am sorry for not updating the Blog sooner, but I will try and do better in the future. No promises though. I think I am going to be pretty busy...

Drumroll Please....

Well, we made another trip to the doctor today. This one was a perinatal specialist. This means, among other things, that our co-pay was higher. It also means that they are supposed to know what is going on while the babies are still in the oven.

We had yet another sonogram. We thought that it would be one of those cool, 3-Dimensional jobs that would allow us to see the babies up close and personal. We didn't get one of those. What we got instead was the basic grainy black and white thing. For example, this picture of one of the babies looks less like a real baby and more like a scene from a horror movie about small, skeletal aliens who peer at us from our static filled televisions:

ooooh...scary....

We did learn several important things today. Here they are in no particular order:

(1) My mother, when given the opportunity, will plop down $12.00 for a DVD of grainy sonogram footage.

(2) We now know what the gender of each baby is. First of all, they are both the same sex. For those that don't already know, the babies are both naughty, stinky, snake-chasing, frog-handling, spit-ball shooting boys. For those who demand physical evidence, we give you this (and may my future son forgive me):


I am not going to explain the above picture or cheapen it with words. If you can't see it, ask a friend to show you what you are missing. (Here is a hint: what is that white arrow painfully pointing to?)

Now, we must decide on names for two boys. That battle is just beginning but will be settled soon. Right now we are leaning toward the following:

• Marshall Wayne Bryant
  
• Broderick Shane Bryant

So, what do you think? Let us hear from you...

New, Grainy Images of the Unborn Wonder Twins

Marcy had a regular check-up at her OB-Gyn (by the way, that sounds like a character name from a Star Wars rip-off, if you pronounce it right). He listened to the babies' heartbeats but could only find one. This is not unusual with twins. I have a good friend here at work that told me she carried twins all the way to labor without ever knowing they were twins. This is because my friend is very old and when she was pregnant, the doctors, or as they called them then, "barbers", were still treating pregnancy with a good exorcism and leech treatment. Okay, I kid, she is not that old (*waves at Joyce*), but it was in the time before sonograms were readily available and her doctor never heard more than one heartbeat (maybe it was just hard to use the stethoscope around all the leeches). Anyway, since Marcy's barber...er...doctor did not hear both heartbeats he asked her to go in for a sonogram yesterday and she did. Here are the results:


Long story short, the babies look fine. Still cant tell the sex of either, and I suppose you should not draw too many conclusions from the picture. What we do know is that one is slightly larger than the other but both are still growing and healthy. One thing the doctor did tell her was that she is only 9 weeks along but already has the belly of someone 14 weeks. If you do some rough projective math, that means that by the time she is ready to deliver, her stomach will be roughly the size of a Hummer. On the upside, she has gained in baby but not in weight. She is still the same weight, even with a few pounds of baby on board. (This is due largely to the fact that her diet has consisted of little else other than Caesar Salad lately. Everything else makes her sick.)

Now, I am no doctor, but I do like to speculate. So, I took the pictures of the babies as they have developed so far and I aged them a few months to see what they make look like. Here are my guesses:

Baby A: the baby on the right of the sonogram is featureless and oddly shaped. It should look something like a large lima bean:
Sure, she will have to wear festive hats so that her teachers and fellow children will know what end to speak to, but she will be loved for her acerbic wit and long litany of self-effacing bean humor.

Baby B: Right now, this baby looks like something I once made with Play-Doh and tried to pass off to my father as a father's day gift. "What is that?" he said. "A puppy?" I replied. If this child continues it's current state of development, I expect a strapping young lad that bears a striking resemblance to Klatu, the tumor turned Martian rebellion leader from the Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi classic Total Recall:


So, I have to say that Marcy and I are both just thrilled.

First Images of the Twins

I have had to delete spam email from my inbox with titles like this one, but I need you all to pull your minds out of the gutter for a moment. Those are not the twins of which I speak. (Although, a new favorite thing to do around the house is to ask Marcy, "So how are you and the twins?" When she responds, I say, "...and the babies?" I figure I will keep doing it until it no longer makes her blush and giggle.)

So, here is the photographic evidence that Marcy is, in fact, carrying two lives in her belly:


"the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being." - Genesis 2:7

There are moments when, even after you think you have everything in your life figured out, God can come along and knock you completely off of your feet. I want to tell you more about the sonogram, but I will do that later...