Confessions of a Premature Drama Queen

Haley has been doing so well that they could stop her TPN nutrition and take out her PICC line. There’s a small chance that she’ll have some food issues and may need a temporary IV for TPN, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. There’s not much else to report other than she’s at 920 grams and digesting her food well.

Today Haley had her now weekly blood tests and everything came up great. Some of her liver and kidney values were high, but they attributed that to her TPN being so concentrated. Her biliruben was also high, but they don’t really treat it this far out and let her liver figure out what it needs to do. Haley’s up to 910 grams, and 4.5 ml/hour of food. Her TPN was cut from being TPN to just sugar water at 1 ml/hour. This is just to keep the PICC line open. If all is well on Wednesday, her PICC line will probably come out and she’ll be totally on breast milk. Her respiratory status is unchanged and will probably stay that way for a week or two. The NP on tonight said that Haley is doing the best she has ever seen for a baby her size.

Haley got rid of one roommate, and gained another. Her big (9 lbs 10 oz) roommate was becoming too noisy and so he got the boot. The new roommate was the first baby we’ve seen that is in worse condition than Haley is. The nurses aren’t allowed to tell us anything about other babies, but her card said she was 1 lb 2 oz. Unless she is incredibly small for her gestational age, she’s probably about 24 weeks gestational age (16 weeks premature). She’s on a ventilator like Haley was, and from my untrained eye seemed to be doing okay. I only got a small glimpse of her, but her foot and leg were really half the size of Haley’s when she was born. Let’s hope things go as well for the new baby as they have for Haley.

Haley also got to put on her first outfit (well, mostly). They didn’t put the shirt on because of the PICC line. The line can be a major source of infection so they were hesitant to put anything over it. We don’t blame them. Haley did however get a nice new hat and some booties that fit. Check out the pictures of her all dolled up.

Today Haley got a day off, no tests, no procedures, nothing new except more food and less IV nutrition. It’s hard to believe that she’s already two weeks old. It actually seems like it’s been much much longer. Today was a great day for Haley, she only had two brady episodes, and kept her pulse-ox up for most of the day. Every Sunday they also check her height and head circumference. Unfortunately she still hasn’t changed from birth. Nobody really expected her to at this stage, but it’s disappointing nonetheless. Her weight went up again and she’s an astounding 900 grams which is 2 pounds for those of you not on the metric system. There’s always a chance she could go down, but it’s good to see her gain some weight.

On another note, today’s post is the first one that was actually written at the time it was posted. Yipee! I’m all caught up.

The pictures that are on this site are not the full sized image, and probably don’t make very good prints. I have the full size images so if you want prints, let me know which pictures you want and I’ll get you the larger images.

Pictures are here: Pictures

Today was a good day, Haley pooped more over the day, and her feedings were continued. She was up to a whopping 860 grams when they last weighed her. Since her tummy was better they increased her food to 4.0 ml/hour. Haley also has sometimes has little episodes where her heart rate drops. They call them “brady” episodes because the technical term for it is bradycardia. The doctors tell us that it’s quite normal at her age and that it is usually due to positioning. She’ll outgrow them and it doesn’t signify that anything is wrong with her heart.

I also got to hold Haley today. We only get to hold her once a day for about an hour, and we can’t pass her around. Usually it’s Nichole that holds because it’s more important for her because it keeps her milk supply up. I love to hold her, but to be honest, it’s terrifying. She’s so small and fragile that I’m afraid I’ll hurt her. Lucky for me she won’t be this small forever and I’ll probably get over the fear.

It’s a running contest between Nichole and I to see who ends up changing the poopy diaper. Haley usually will only poop two to three times a day at this point, and that will go up as she gets older and eats more food. So far I’ve been winning the contest because I’ve only had to change one poopy diaper and it wasn’t that bad, while poor Nichole has changed many, including some very messy ones. I was excited about not changing messy diapers until we noticed that she had not had a messy one in quite a while.

Fortunately the nurses were also aware of the problem and they started checking her abdominal girth to make sure her belly wasn’t getting too bloated. Not only was Haley not pooping, but her residual (amount of food left in her tummy) was on the high side. They stopped her constant feeding for a couple of hours to let her digest. They also ordered an X-Ray to check her lungs, PICC line and tummy. The X-Ray showed everything was fine.

At the 4:00 care time, the NNP came to check on Haley, and while she was doing that, she pooped! Haley, not the NNP. It wasn’t a whole lot, and not as much as the X-Ray showed but it was progress and the NNP said her bowel sounds were great and there was nothing to worry about.

At the evening care time, I also took my all time favorite picture (so far) of Haley:

No news is good news. Everything is progressing just fine. They lowered the amount of air Haley is getting through her high-flow oxygen. It’s now at 1.5 l/min at 40% oxygen. Her feedings went up again so she’s at 3.0 ml/hour of food. She also put on a chunk of weight and is up to 840 grams.

While we were there for the 8:00 PM care time, a set of twins were born. It was a boy and a girl, each weighed around 3 pounds. We don’t think they’ll stick around too long in our little NICU room because as far as we can tell both of them are doing just fine without any oxygen or anything. One thing is for sure, having babies for roommates is a noisy experience.

Since little Haley doesn’t like lights, and is especially frightened by the flash of a camera we decided to get a camera that was better at taking low light pictures. That’s the only reason we got the new camera, Haley pictures. It certainly was not because I like techno-gadgets or because cameras are really cool. We ended up getting a Nikon N80 with a 50 mm/1.8f lense. It’s freaking sweet. It takes really good pictures:

Today was another positive day for Haley, her food went up by another 0.5 ml/hour to 2.5 ml/hour and she’s starting to gain weight (up to 790 g). She’s almost back to her birth weight which usually takes 20 days for premies, so she’s ahead of the game.

Everyday Nichole gets one chance to hold Haley. Recently they’ve been doing what they call “kangaroo care”, which means naked baby (except for diaper) on mommy’s bare chest. This is great for the baby because they are comforted by being close to mommy and premies that do this usually fare better. When Haley is out she’s calm and relaxed, her breathing becomes more consistent and she’s a happy little girl.

Of course getting Haley out of her isolet is an ordeal with all of the wires and tubes that she’s connected to. usually the nurse handles the baby, and it’s dad’s responsibility to control the wire mess as much as possible. We got Haley out alright, and then after an hour it was time for her to return. That’s when it happened. Nichole was still sitting in the chair with Haley and I picked up her oxygen tube to get ready for the move. Not realizing that when I did this a great big gush of water went pouring into Haley’s nose. Nichole’s shirt was all wet and Haley was not a happy baby. Her pulse-ox went down, her heart raced, and panicked. Fortunately the nurse didn’t and after a small bump in her oxygen and some suction, Haley was back in her box and doing just fine.

The nurse practitioner also came in with a teeny-tiny t-shirt and asked if they could take a picture of Haley for the March of Dimes. Knowing what it’s like to have a premie, we were more than happy to help. Here’s a picture of Haley in her shirt:

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Not much went on with Haley today. She’s holding steading on her high-flow oxygen and her food is gradually increasing. She’s on a continuous 1.0 ml of food every hour, and as long as she does will with it, she’ll go up about 0.5 ml/hour every day until she reaches 5 ml/hour and then they can take her off her IV food and take out her PICC line.

We did have an odd encounter today. The hospital social worker came to see us. When she first said she was social worker I thought she was going to check to make sure we had family support, that we were coping okay, yada yada yada. Turns out she just wanted us to apply for Social Security. Apparently the everything that had happened made my body age 35 years without me knowing it. Not really. It turns out that premature and low birth-weight babies qualify a special disability program to help the parents out while their child is in the hospital. While Haley’s in the hospital, we automatically qualify and once she’s out they use parental income to determine how much we get (which is going to be zero cause we make too much money). It’s nice that I’ll be able to get some of the money I put in back because once I retire, I’m sure there will be no money in Social Security for me.

Not much is going on with Haley today, which is a good thing. At this point they just keep feeding her and weaning her off her oxygen. Nichole once again got to hold Haley today, but they decided to put a cute little hat on her to keep head warm.

We did get a chance to talk to one of the nurse practitioner’s that was in the OR when Haley was born. Everything for me was such a blur that it was nice to learn what happened. One thing I didn’t realize was how fast they had to do things. During a normal c-section the anesthesiologist will use a spinal block to prevent the mom from feeling anything going on with the surgery. With Nichole’s platelet’s the way they were, our anesthesiologist thought it better to just put her under general anesthesia rather than risk her bleeding in her spinal cord and possible paralysis. The problem with knocking mom out is that the anesthesia can then move into the baby, so to prevent this they move very quickly. How long did it take from the time Nichole was knocked out till we had a baby? Three minutes! That’s it. From the time the anesthesiologist says go, to the time we have a baby is just three minutes.

It’s even more amazing since Nichole’s c-section was a complicated one. In most c-sections done today, an incision is made across the bikini line to expose the uterus, and then the uterus is opened in the same direction. In Nichole’s case, they made the bikini line incision, but since she wasn’t very far along, her uterus wasn’t very wide at the bottom and the had to make a vertical incision (the way they always used to do c-sections, but never do anymore unless it’s necessary). To make matters worse Haley was in a breech (feet pointing down) position and the placenta was on the top side right where they needed to cut. Talk about a lot of things to consider and decisions to make in three minutes.