PHOTO/Aurora Phoenix is growing up.
Baby shower today for Aurora Phoenix
MANAGING EDITOR
A baby shower for Aurora Phoenix, the daughter of Key Westers Rock Solomon and Michele Muse, will be held at 3 p.m., today, in the gardens of the Southernmost Guest House, 1317 Duval St., at the corner of Duval and South Streets. A gift registry has been created at http://www.amazon.com/registry/baby/2VBGEJZHRR47K and Centennial Bank has opened an account for “Aurora Phoenix,” and is accepting donations on her behalf at all of its Key West branches.
Today is Aurora’s 86th day in a Miami hospital, but still four weeks before her and her sister’s due date.
“She has gotten through what the doctors call the ‘scary part’ of her treatment,” writes her father, “and now we wait and watch as she slowly gains strength. The two biggest remaining hurdles have been to get her off the oxygen, and to transition from the feeding tube to a bottle.”
As Solomon points out, “Babies this young often cannot distinguish when to breath and when to swallow, so they are fed with one tube going to the stomach, with a separate breathing tube to the lungs. Now that she is just on oxygen support, and no longer has a tube in her lungs, they tried a bottle to see how she would do, but decided to keep her feeding tube in. She did much better than expected, and after getting her first taste of mothers milk, Aurora has been demanding the bottle in fits, and has ripped out her feeding tube every day since. A couple days ago, they stopped putting it back in. So now like a little rock star, Aurora is getting bottle service only.”
Solomon says that Aurora’s “lungs are still giving her some trouble, and as they tried again to wean her off her oxygen (Sunday) night, she got apnea and her blood oxygen desaturated. The doctors explained since the very beginning that the hardest thing for babies like Aurora to overcome is lung development. She has come a long way, but even still sometimes she can simply forget to breath.”
Identical twin sisters Aria and Aurora were born over 3 months premature after a sudden onset of TTTS on Aug. 18. Twin to twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS) is a disease of the placenta (or afterbirth) that affects identical twin pregnancies. Michele was air lifted to Miami but it was too late for Aria, who had already died. An emergency surgery was performed on Aurora who was rushed to the hospital weighing less than one pound.
She is expected to be in the hospital for the rest of the year. With that in mind, both parents relocated from Key West to Miami. With mounting medical bills and the parents’ cost of living, a fund has been established through to assist them at GoFundMe.
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