I'm not patient enough to be in the medical field.

As our nurse said today, our whole country wants what we want, and we want it now. I want sweet Emary's wound to heal NOW. And when I see progress from one day to the next, I expect to see it every day after that. Unfortunately, that's not the reality of our situation. I feel like Emma's incision isn't really getting any better...but again, at least it's not getting any worse. I just can't imagine how long it's going to take to heal. A few days ago there was a round white part in the middle of the wound that looked different than the rest of it. The nurse asked Dr. Troup what that was, and he said necrotic tissue (this is dead tissue, for those of us who took biology for non-majors). Yesterday and today I noticed a little sliver of something black in there. Black! That scared me, and today the same nurse who asked the doctor about the white stuff noticed it, too. She said that black usually means necrotic tissue, and she's thinking that it's tissue underneath that's dying and is coming up to the surface. Dying tissue doesn't sound great, but this can result from infection. Let's hope that all this tissue death is over with! This was the deepest part of the wound, so hopefully, in my medically uneducated mind, this means that the deepest part of the wound is finally healing, filling in with good stuff, and pushing out the bad!

Ok, enough about the nasty incision. Emma was so well-behaved today. She's even getting a little more patient about eating. She's very aware when it's time to eat on her 4-hour schedule, but she's less fussy about it while we're getting the bottle and her pillow ready. Ha, that sounds a spoiled luxurious life, doesn't it - getting her pillow ready! The irony is that spoiled and luxurious would be getting to feed her like a regular baby. That day is coming...soon I hope.

My worry for the day is that Emma has to have the state screening they give all newborns for the third time. The first test came back abnormal, but they anticipated it because of the meds she was on. Apparently, the second one has come back abnormal, too, and she wasn't on any kind of meds when they conducted that bloodwork. I wasn't there when the NICU doctor came by today, and he didn't document much about it Emma's chart, so I don't really know what that's all about. If you're looking for something specific (and additional) to pray for, please pray that this test comes back ok - I just can't handle something else going wrong. Especially since these tests are designed to detect endocrine, blood cell, and metabolic disorders that can be deadly if not detected (and hopefully treated/cured) now.

No pictures for a couple days...when not much is happening, there's not a lot of new stuff to take pictures of!