It’s official. Unless something goes wrong, and we know it easily could, Brandon is coming home Christmas day. It’s extra funny because my Birthday is Dec. 25th and Katelyn came home on Amy’s birthday in October. This will make Brandon’s total stay in the NICU around 5 and a half months.
Let me start by telling you about Katleyn. She is doing really well. We gave her the overnight room-air trial several days ago but the doctor hasn’t looked over the data that is recorded on the saturation monitor to let us know how she did. We hope that he will get a chance to evaluate it tomorrow and let us know if we can take her off of he oxygen. It was kind of strange to see her for so long without a tube stuck to her face. She is sleeping really well through the night. She sleeps very deeply and every once in a while, her apnea monitor goes off. A little stirring seems to do the trick but it makes me want to keep the monitor for a long time. Katelyn is becoming very social. She smiles a lot and she will spend long periods of time trying to talk back to us. She seems to quickly charm everyone with whom she comes in contact.
Brandon is also becoming more social. It seems like getting rid of the morphine is really helping him. He also does a lot of smiling and he is very cute. While he certainly can be demanding, he seems much more calm and sweet than Katelyn. It makes me wonder what this means for our future.
Brandon’s feeding is improving but he is not any where near being able to eat full meals on his own. What this means for us is that we will have to continue to feed him through a tube until he is able to eat on his own. It also means that we will need a lot more medical equipment. For Katelyn we have oxygen tanks and the apnea monitor that tells alarms if her heart rate or breathing rate falls out of the normal range. In addition to these things, we will need a pulse oximeter (to tell us the oxygen saturation levels in his blood/how well he is breathing), a pediatric scale to measure how much he is eating when he is nursing and a pump to push down his feedings smoothly over the correct period of time. We are really just moving the NICU to our house.
In addition to equipment we also needed to get training. We needed to learn how to use all of the equipment. Amy and I also had to learn how to pass a tube down Brandon’s nose and into his stomach. We’d seen this done often and but this worried me a lot. Of course, just before we had to do learn how to do this, a nurse told us a bunch of horror stories about what can go wrong. I actually ran into some troubles on my first shot. It wasn’t because I didn’t know what I was doing so it was actually nice to run into problems with a nurse there rather than having this happen at home. It will still take me a while to totally feel at ease, but I can do it now. While we have high hopes that his eating will quickly improve when he is home, there are some advantages to using this tube. For example, we can check and see how full he is before we feed him and if he has gas, we can just pull out all of the extra air. Quick and easy burping.
I’ve learned a lot and they often joke about giving parents honorary nursing degrees after they’ve had a baby in the NICU for a certain amount of time. However, Amy has really learned an exceptional amount. She does a much better job at remembering the names of all of the medications and what they do. While I forget the name of anything I can’t spell. The other day, Amy was visiting Brandon. The nurse that was taking car of Brandon was a more experienced nurse and she often helps the other nurses. Another nurse came in the room and asked if Brandon’s nurse could help her change an ostomy bag. Brandon’s nurse was taking care of two babies and said she couldn’t but she volunteered Amy. “She knows all about ostomy bags.” Amy went to help and it turned out that she actually had some good tips and tricks that she had learned up at Primary Children’s that she was able to share. Because they don’t have a surgeon at UVRMC they don’t often have babies with an ostomy bag.
I’m often reminded that we are really lucky. I don’t think we have any idea how many bullets we have dodged. The other day when Brandon passed his hearing test one of the nurses told us how amazing it was because he had been exposed to so many antibiotics. We didn’t even know that this was a possible side effect of getting so much antibiotic exposure.
Let me start by telling you about Katleyn. She is doing really well. We gave her the overnight room-air trial several days ago but the doctor hasn’t looked over the data that is recorded on the saturation monitor to let us know how she did. We hope that he will get a chance to evaluate it tomorrow and let us know if we can take her off of he oxygen. It was kind of strange to see her for so long without a tube stuck to her face. She is sleeping really well through the night. She sleeps very deeply and every once in a while, her apnea monitor goes off. A little stirring seems to do the trick but it makes me want to keep the monitor for a long time. Katelyn is becoming very social. She smiles a lot and she will spend long periods of time trying to talk back to us. She seems to quickly charm everyone with whom she comes in contact.
Brandon is also becoming more social. It seems like getting rid of the morphine is really helping him. He also does a lot of smiling and he is very cute. While he certainly can be demanding, he seems much more calm and sweet than Katelyn. It makes me wonder what this means for our future.
Brandon’s feeding is improving but he is not any where near being able to eat full meals on his own. What this means for us is that we will have to continue to feed him through a tube until he is able to eat on his own. It also means that we will need a lot more medical equipment. For Katelyn we have oxygen tanks and the apnea monitor that tells alarms if her heart rate or breathing rate falls out of the normal range. In addition to these things, we will need a pulse oximeter (to tell us the oxygen saturation levels in his blood/how well he is breathing), a pediatric scale to measure how much he is eating when he is nursing and a pump to push down his feedings smoothly over the correct period of time. We are really just moving the NICU to our house.
In addition to equipment we also needed to get training. We needed to learn how to use all of the equipment. Amy and I also had to learn how to pass a tube down Brandon’s nose and into his stomach. We’d seen this done often and but this worried me a lot. Of course, just before we had to do learn how to do this, a nurse told us a bunch of horror stories about what can go wrong. I actually ran into some troubles on my first shot. It wasn’t because I didn’t know what I was doing so it was actually nice to run into problems with a nurse there rather than having this happen at home. It will still take me a while to totally feel at ease, but I can do it now. While we have high hopes that his eating will quickly improve when he is home, there are some advantages to using this tube. For example, we can check and see how full he is before we feed him and if he has gas, we can just pull out all of the extra air. Quick and easy burping.
I’ve learned a lot and they often joke about giving parents honorary nursing degrees after they’ve had a baby in the NICU for a certain amount of time. However, Amy has really learned an exceptional amount. She does a much better job at remembering the names of all of the medications and what they do. While I forget the name of anything I can’t spell. The other day, Amy was visiting Brandon. The nurse that was taking car of Brandon was a more experienced nurse and she often helps the other nurses. Another nurse came in the room and asked if Brandon’s nurse could help her change an ostomy bag. Brandon’s nurse was taking care of two babies and said she couldn’t but she volunteered Amy. “She knows all about ostomy bags.” Amy went to help and it turned out that she actually had some good tips and tricks that she had learned up at Primary Children’s that she was able to share. Because they don’t have a surgeon at UVRMC they don’t often have babies with an ostomy bag.
I’m often reminded that we are really lucky. I don’t think we have any idea how many bullets we have dodged. The other day when Brandon passed his hearing test one of the nurses told us how amazing it was because he had been exposed to so many antibiotics. We didn’t even know that this was a possible side effect of getting so much antibiotic exposure.
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