Update on Whitney's condition

First off, a quick update on Whitney. It's now been about 40 hours since her surgery and she has been doing just fine. She's been stable ever since they put her on the oscillator after the surgery. The oscillator is pumping 480 tiny gentle breaths into her lungs a per minute. They are keeping Whitney medicated to relieve her of pain and to keep her calm and sedated. Throughout this next coming week they are going to try and wean her off the sedation medicine if possible so that she can start feeding her tiny amounts of breastmilk hopefully shortly after that. So far not much drama since the surgery, for which we are greatful. We visited Whitney late last night around 11pm, we were away from the hospital the whole after noon and evening, and we wanted to say a quick goodnight to Whitney before heading back to our friend's place to sleep.

We got to the hospital and found that there was a new nurse we hadn't yet met working with Whitney. This nurse was pretty cool, she is a neat freak, which is not a bad thing. Whitney's bed setup never looked better. The linens were folded up so perfectly and the bedding was completely symmetrical, and Whitney was resting on her back and looked so comfortable. The new nurse introduced herself and she was very nice and personable. We liked her immediately.

Again, we only went there to say goodnight, but lo and behold Whitney decided to wake up and show off her adorable eyes again to us. It felt like we were only there for 20 minutes, but we looked at the clock and before we knew it, it had already past 1am. We were probably being naughty for keeping our baby up for so long, especially since the nurse did mention that Whitney needed lots of rest to recover from her surgery. We just couldn't part from her.

Whitney had a cute eye mask that we had gotten in a donated NICU tote bag and it worked really well, but sadly it was probably tossed in the hospital laundry with all the old bedding that Whitney had. The nurses felt bad that they lost the eye mask and one of the cut out a new eye mask from some sterile cloth material and drew a two sleeping eyes on the mask. It's not as cute as the first one, but it serves the same purpose and it still looks good.

My dad (first-time grandpa Montgomery) Bill Montgomery, flew down from Hawaii and arrived here in Arizona Thursday morning at about 3:15am. I picked him up from the Sky Harbor International airport and we drove straight to the hospital to see Whitney. My dad wanted to see his first grandchild in person before she went into surgery, and since the doctors (and Whitney) are always surprising us, we decided to be on the safe side and see Whitney right away (just in case they had decided to change up their schedule and do surgery in the morning). I'm so glad dad was able to see his granddaughter in time before the surgery. If he had flown in one day later, it could have been too late. I'd like to give a quick shout out to grandpa Montgomery's work for making his short but very positive visit possible.