After 5 weeks in NICU, our baby goes home!

After the swallow study confirmed our baby was silently aspirating with no apparent reason, we entered a waiting game to see if he would outgrow it 2 weeks after. Then he didn't, the second swallow study revealed the same results as the first one. So now it all came down to how can we go home with him aspirating and stay safe. The answer: a gastrostomy feeding tube. However, this also meant that they needed to check if he was silently aspirating any reflux. A 24hr pH probe study revealed he probably was because the reflux was coming high enough and quite frequent. What does all this mean? A Nissen fundoplication was needed to stop the reflux from coming up the esophagus. This type of fundoplication is done by wrapping a portion of the stomach around the esophagus so the reflux can't go up. This also meant our baby would have a big scar on his belly for the rest of his life. We didn't take this lightly and sought second opinions, discussed with doctors and cried a lot before we let the surgeon do this.

Surgery Day: Gastrostomy tube and Nissen fundoplication

Surgery day came April 19, 2013. The night before, we gave our baby his first bath and took pictures of his intact little body before the surgery. He was calm the morning of surgery day, even with his IV on the head since the night before (which took 5 tries). He came out of surgery without complications. It was really hard to see him in pain with his teary eyes, intubated and unable to cry as he was waking up from anesthesia, heartbreaking to say the least. Morphine and sedatives kept him calm for the most part until he could receive a feeding again in 48 hours. He is such a resilient little boy. 
Once the IV was out, he was very awake looking at the toys in the room, responding to every single noise he heard and fussing for attention. He was built up on his feeds to 65 cc, which is around 2 oz., every 3 hours.

A week later, we were sent home with a feeding pump and required supplies to feed and take care of his g-tube and incision site at home.