It worked!

Thank you all so much for all the thoughts, wishes and prayers. Luca is most likely coming home tomorrow. As you can imagine, Daniel and I are very excited. I think we're going to cocoon for at least a day, maybe tomorrow and the next, before we have people over to meet him. I'm trying to fight my tendency to overdo it, but I may not hold out until Wednesday before coming out of the cocoon. We'll see.

So, here is what they think happened:

As you probably know, I had Gestational Diabetes during pregnancy that required me to take a blood sugar lowering medication. We were told that he would probably need an IV to bring up his blood sugar levels when he was born. In the womb, Luca's pancreas produced a lot of insulin to deal with my high blood sugar. Then, when he came out and was no longer getting my high blood sugar, all that extra insulin made his own blood sugar plummet. And plummet it did. At the super low level of blood sugar he had just after birth, he could have easily been having seizures and worse. Thank God he didn't.

The IV not working was unexpected. The doctors are thinking that he still had a lot of the medication I took running through his system. There was a lot of discussion about the half-life of the medicine. The treatment would be two-fold: be patient as the medication worked its way out of his system and get him eating protein (milk) so that his body had something longer lasting than glucose to digest. The big problems arose when he needed so much glucose to keep his bs normal AND he couldn't keep milk down. Needing more glucose than they were giving him meant the IV would have to go through a larger vein which would require the NICU.

The night we got that news was a long one. The nursery nurse that saw Luca (and a very emotional Ilona) through the night looked completely haggard the next morning. It was not looking good. But we asked everyone to send good thoughts, and by that next afternoon, he had held down food repeatedly. By that evening, he was clearly on the mend.

I am so grateful to everyone who has cared for him, physically, virtually, by taking care of us, or in any way at all. THANK YOU!

All he has left to do now is learn to suck. But that will come in time, and until then, we know how to feed him. I am so extremely excited to take him home and introduce him to everyone!

Watch out, world...Here I come...