Saturday 20 February

Sarah's not been able to connect to the Internet to update the blog for a couple of days so I am back in charge again and there's a fair bit to catch up on. Firstly, both boys are still feeding well and the Docs are very impressed with this - they say that the fact that they are feeding so well is really important because not being fed intravenously eliminates another potential source of infection. Having said that, both have small infections at the moment which are being dealt with. Joe was having another transfusion this morning and I think Harry was due to have the same later also Joe's eye is a bit runny still and a swab has now been done to check it out. Joe's salt and sugar levels are a bit wonky and they're being treated with medication.

We spoke to the consultant regarding the state of Joe's lungs and he left us in no doubt that they are extremely poor...his exact description was "pretty evil". He reckons that the only thing to do is wait for Joe to gradually grow and hope that the lungs improve with age. It is almost certain than Joe will be needing oxygen for many months and potentially years and it is likely that his lungs will never be 100%. He told us not to expect him to turn out to be at all athletic....having seen the state of the remainder of the brood this comes as no surprise. It was a bit of a shock though to be told that his chances of survival remain at only 50/50 even though he's been here for over 3 weeks now.

Sarah has been suffering with an extremely painful nipple (no tittering at the back of the classroom, please !) and when I left this aftrnoon she was waiting to hear from the midwife team at the hospital to see if there is anything that can be done. Hopefully it's not caused by an infection but having Googled in "nipples" I have scoured literally hundreds of websites but I was unable to find anything which may be causing the problem....but it was fun looking !!

Seriously, it will be awful if she has to stop expressing because the boys are feeding so well at the moment and the prospect of them having to change now can only be bad news.

Sarah's home tomorrow so hopefully she'll be able to update this in greater detail then.