counting calories

We went to the cardiologist yesterday and it was a mixed bag.  Sophie’s lungs are still healthy, so the most pressing threat from her heart condition is not a problem right now.  That’s the good news.

The not great news is that Sophie’s growth rate is, shall we say, less than impressive.  (We already knew this.  In a meeting with the nutritionist last week, we found out that Sophie is in the zero percentile size-wise.  Brian quipped that there are no babies smaller than her!)

The slow growth is due to the heart defect.  (Inheriting Brian’s freaky metabolism doesn’t explain it.)  Her little body is just burning a lot of calories doing extra circulation.  The average baby gains 30-40 grams per day.  Sophie’s averaged 17 since we left the hospital.  We might be paranoid that about some failure as parents, but her growth was wimpy in the hospital, too.

We’re very happy with the way her care is being managed.  The cardiologist developed a plan to increase her caloric intake.  She was getting 17% more calories than the normal recommendation for her size & that obviously wasn’t cutting it.  We’re now going to do continuous feeds through the night to increase her calories to 50% more than normal.  We’d like to call her our little beefcake before long.  She already seems pretty overwhelmed by digestion, so we’re hoping she can handle it.  She gets 463 cals each day, which doesn't seem like much till you think about it in terms of her bodyweight.  For an adult, this would be around 10,000 calories!

We go back to the cardiologist in three weeks for another weigh in.  The takeaway point is that surgery will be required down the road if she doesn’t start plumping up faster.