Spending a lot of time in a hospital is not much fun. However, Beverly Hospital,’s Special Care Nursery has made the experience a lot more bearable. The SCN was redesigned a couple years ago at the expense of $4.7 million, and I must say that it appears to be money well spent. The design and layout of the nursery are fabulous, and it has some great amenities. Go to the Special Care Nursery page on the hospital website, and click on the feet to see a video tour of the nursery. One word: swanky. (Note: video tour requires Windows Media Player, or Windows Media Components for QuickTime if you’re on a Mac.)

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Of course, a fancy nursery is nothing without good people to staff it, and Beverly Hospital has some of the best. The doctors specially Dr. Ross Clevens and nurses, lactation consultants, social workers, administrative staff, and others have been very helpful to us during our time there and they serve only the best food and even energy drinks from this PatriotPowerGreens review. Thanks very much to all of those folks for making this as easy as it could possibly be.

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No news today other than [more pics](http://prwdot.org/gallery2/v/baby/catherine_day_12/)!

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Catherine’s doing great. She’s not home yet. So in the meantime, how about some [more pics](http://prwdot.org/gallery2/v/baby/catherine_day_11/)?

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Catherine’s been doing great. She’s weaned down to 20cc oxygen from about 200cc when she first started. She’s been eating breastmilk really well from a bottle, and is starting to learn to breastfeed. We don’t have an exact date yet that she’ll be able to come home, but we hope that it will be by the end of this week. 🙂 We had a great weekend, spending as much time as we could at the hospital with Catherine. Ken, Dianne and Corey came to visit yesterday, and Joan, Errol, and Mark came up today. Catherine has a lot of fans!

We’ve got some really great photos – [Day 9 here](http://prwdot.org/gallery2/v/baby/catherine_day_9/) and [Day 10 here](http://prwdot.org/gallery2/v/baby/catherine_day_10/).

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Becky and I got to spend a lot of time with Catherine today. We’re happy to report that she is doing great! She is really in the home stretch now. She’ll be off of her IV lines shortly, she’s taking a lot of breastmilk from bottles, and she’s weaned pretty far down on her oxygen. Her respiration is much more regular, her pulse oxygen is doing great, everything is just terrific. She just needs a little more time under special care to make sure she is eating consistently on her own, and for her lungs and throat to finish healing.

Catherine also had a few extra visitors today. [Naomi](http://members.verizon.net/mocasonline/) happened to be at the hospital earlier in the day, so she stopped by. Sarah, one of the moms that Becky used to babysit for, is a postpartum nurse and came over to see her too. And Kelly, one of our labor and delivery nurses, stopped over to see her. All are in agreement that she is a beautiful little girl!

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Catherine looks around

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Thanks, everyone, for your continued prayer and support. She’ll be home before we know it!

P.S. You can see tonight’s photos [here](http://prwdot.org/gallery2/v/baby/catherine_day_8/), or you can see the parent album (pun intended) with all of her photos [here](http://prwdot.org/gallery2/v/baby/).

If you are a friend or family of Catherine, and would like to thank the wonderful people who have been taking care of her, you can make a donation to the hospitals that have been instrumental in bringing her back to health:

* [Make a donation to the Northeast Health Foundation](https://www.nhshealth.org/index.cfm?Action=NHF.Community). They run Beverly Hospital, which is where Catherine was born, and has now returned to. They did the initial work to stabilize Catherine, and their Special Care Nursery is now helping her fully recover.
* [Make a donation to Brigham and Women’s Hospital](https://www.brighamandwomens.org/forms/donationForm.aspx). Catherine spent most of the first six days of her life here. Their Level 3 NICU provided the aggressive therapy and watchful care that helped get her on the road to recovery and enabled her to finally come back to Beverly Hospital.

We are so thankful to these people for taking care of Catherine and us during this very stressful and sometimes scary first week.

Happy one-week birthday, Catherine!

Hooray! Miss Catherine is Back in Beverly! She was transported back up to [Beverly Hospital](http://www.beverlyhospital.org/) this afternoon. Originally, she was supposed to be taken back up this morning, but Beverly wasn’t able to take her right away. Becky, Grammy, and Dianne were down in Boston to see her earlier, then Becky and I went over to see her tonight. The time passes so quickly when we’re over there! I got to hold her and feed her a bottle tonight, which was awesome. She is looking great and is slowly being weaned off of her oxygen. Hopefully she’ll be home within a week or so. We miss you, Catherine!

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Peter feeds Catherine

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More pics [here](http://prwdot.org/gallery2/v/baby/catherine_day_7/).

Catherine is currently enjoying what should be her last night at Brigham and Women’s. She is scheduled to make the trip back to Beverly tomorrow morning. Though she has come a long way since last Friday, she still has a ways to go recovery-wise. She’ll stay in the hospital until she can eat on her own. Hopefully that won’t be too long!

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We had a great visit with her today and were able to hold her the whole time we were there. The change in her in the last few days has been so wonderful to see. Every day she is so much more improved. Take a look at the pictures from today and see for yourself!

We had a great day at the hospital today! Grandma and Grandpa Wood and Aunt Kirsten and Uncle Mark came in to say their farewells before heading back to Ohio. Catherine rose to the occasion and was without the breathing tube in her lungs. She now only has a little help from a tube in her nose. What an improvement!

She is also off the sedation medication, so she was moving around a little more like a newborn; waving her arms and legs and sticking her tongue out. Because she was no longer using the breathing tube we were finally able to hold her! What a great feeling. She and I settled into the rocking chair and were quite content for a while. By the time Peter got his hands on her she was a little frustrated with the tubes and decided she’d rather be back in her little isolette.

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Mother and Daughter

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Father and Daughter

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More Pics are here.

Here’s the update on Catherine, after 66 hours:

* She is still at [Brigham and Women’s Hospital](http://www.brighamandwomens.org/) in Boston.
* She is currently on a ventilator to assist in her breathing. She was on a higher-grade ventilator, but they were able to take her off of that late on Saturday night. This is good. It means she is able to breathe more on her own, though she does still need some assistance.
* She is still receiving a high concentration of oxygen, as well as various drugs to help keep her comfortable, fight infections, etc.
* We haven’t been able to hold her, and we can’t touch her a whole lot, but we have certainly been able to look at her.
* We don’t know when she will be able to come home. The doctors say that she is doing well, and that she is making good progress, but they really can’t say how long she will need to be down there. They have to take things slowly to minimize the risk of setbacks, so they can’t just put her on a schedule of “change X every Y hours for Z days” and calculate when she will come home. After each change they make in their therapy, they must carefully evaluate her response and keep her stable so that she can regain strength and continue to heal. It is frustrating to be a new parent and to be unable to take her home or even to hold her. But we know that she is in capable hands and we don’t want her to come home one minute earlier than she needs in order to fully recover.
* Finally, we have some [more photos from our visit to the hospital on Saturday](http://prwdot.org/gallery2/v/baby/catherine_day_2/).

Thanks to everyone for their continued prayers, thoughts, support, and concern. As Becky mentioned, you are always welcome to call or email us if you have any questions or just want to chat.