What's new tonight?

Both girls have their NG tubes out.  Evelyn took a bottle tonight but fell asleep with five cc left to go.  That's not considered serious in terms of overall nutrition, but if either of them fall asleep with, say, 20 cc left to go in their bottle, the guilty party will get an NG tube inserted again and the rest will be force-fed.  So we'll see how that goes.

We heard an interesting theory about why the SCN rules (and, to a different degree, the NICU rules at CPMC) are they way they are.  Obviously, adults carry in germs from the outside.  So do kids, but more so.  And yet sibling minors are allowed in the NICU, while non-sibling minors are not.  The distinction is not merely to limit the number of germ-infected kids coming near the babies.  Rather, siblings are considered safer for the babies because whatever the mother has been exposed to will generate antibodies that will be present in the breastmilk.  It is assumed that the microbes to which the siblings have been exposed will also have infected the mother, and she will have generated the antibodies to combat the diseases that her own kids are carrying.  So allowing the siblings in to see the babies is actually a calculated risk -- siblings are more likely to bring in pathogens to which the babies are already naturally resistant, while non-sibling minors are flatly more dangerous.   Of course, all kids are equally dangerous to other people's kids in the NICU, but petting other people's newborns is frowned upon anyway.

The nurses and doctors at CPMC were always quite cautious about prognosis.  By contrast, the ones at Peninsula can't seem to stop stroking our egos about how great the girls were doing and how they'll soon be home.