Acid Reflux and Apnea

So Avalon is 4 weeks old now. She doesn't have her nasal cannula anymore nor does she have a feeding tube. YAY! She is up to 4 lbs 11 oz. :) I honestly thought she'd be home by now. The sad fact is that she would be home by now if she could just get over her apnea spells. She is now on all food by mouth, either from me or bottles so that's great. For NICU babies that's typically the biggest hurdle. Unfortunately for her it's her apnea. Her team of doctors believes that its her acid reflux that is causing her to protect her airway (which is good for her to do) which then though causes her not to breathe and go into the apnea and have her oxygen saturation drop too low. MOST of her spells she gets out of on her own without any help. But she is still having 1-2 a day that require stimulation or the oxygen mask to get her out of it. She has to go 7 days without any apnea in order to go home.
She is on prilosec for her reflux but it doesn't seem to be making very much of a difference. The doctors wanted to start her on thickened feeds through her bottles but I didn't want them to. All my instincts told me that would make things much worse especially in the long run. The developmental specialist agreed with me, thank goodness. So I met with the whole team this morning and asked if we could try having her on her stomach after feeds for a bit as that helped a lot with Autumn. They agreed to try that first. So for the next 48 hours we will try that with her on an incline as well and see if that makes a difference. I really think it will. If it doesn't then our next step is to decrease the amount of calorie fortification that is going in her bottles to see if that helps her. Since she often does better after breastfeeding from me than when she has a bottle of breastmilk with the added fortifier in it. They don't really want to do this because they want her to keep gaining weight well but I think she will just fine with strait breastmilk. If that doesn't help then we will try an antibiotic called arithromiocin (don't know how to spell that) that actually causes the GI tract to empty a bit more quickly which could help her not to reflux as much. If all those things fail THEN we will try thickened feeds. Hopefully at least one of those things will work first.
So that's our plan for now. Fingers crossed that she will have huge improvement in the coming week and we can take her home!
Here are a bunch of pictures to enjoy!