NICU - 48 hours
Seeing our baby in his little bed in the NICU was strange. I still wasn’t emotional at all. I think it hadn’t sunk in that he was ours. The nurses said that he was doing really well and hadn’t had anymore breathing or dusky spells. He had an IV giving him antibiotics – I think this was for some slight meconium staining (which I wasn’t even aware of until that moment). He had three monitors taped to his chest and we could view the readouts on the screen near his bed. One was for his heart rate one was for respiratory patterns and I forgot what the third one was for. It looked more intense than it was. All of those wires and tubes were more of a hindrance than a scare. Everytime I would breastfeed him I had to make sure all of these wires were not snagging on something. Because I wasn’t able to initiate breastfeeding in that first 12 hours Stanley’s glucose levels dropped below 50. The nurses gave him donor milk via syringe/tube and I believe with a spoon as well. We had to get three good glucose levels above 50 in a row in order to stop doing glucose tests, AKA heel pricks. His poor heels were a mess.
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| You can see all the little pin pricks on his heels. Poor fella. |
With my milk plus donor milk we got two good results and the final good result was on my breast milk alone! Hurrah! There were good things and bad things about the NICU.
Good Things:
• Almost one nurse to one patient 24 hour care. His nurses cared for him and one other baby who was actually in an incubator type of thing. The NICU has 7 pods(rooms). From what I could tell some pods had more babies in them than others. Stanley was in Pod G and there were 4 babies in there and 2 nurses. It was nice to know that there was a knowledgeable person in there all the time just in case something happened.
• We had a variety of nurses. Leah, Soly, Dan, Alyssa, Lynnette and the charge nurse, Krista. They were all very different but all very helpful. They would call me in my room whenever Stanley started to stir so that I could come down and breastfeed. Many of them would help me with breastfeeding or talk to me about newborns or have me watch safety videos like infant CPR or purple crying or car seat safety. Dan was extremely knowledgeable about breastfeeding. He gave me all sorts of advice from stimulating my milk ducts to helping tube feed donor milk to pumping my own milk.
• Lactation Consultants, Robin and Monika were amazing. During the day they would meet me practically every time I would go to feed Stanley. Robin was the lead consultant, she would massage the breast, tell me what to look for in a good latch. She taught me how to self express and feed him with a spoon. She was truly amazing and I learned so much from her.
Bad Things:
• Pacifiers – The nurses would use a pacifier to help calm him. This isn’t a horrible thing but for a situation in which we started breasfeeding late the lactation consultant thought that he was getting nipple confusion from the pacifier (he did some damage to my right nipple, it’s fine now.)
• Bath. The first nurse, Leah, gave him his first bath and it was rough. She was really aggressive. His hair looked fabulous afterwards but I really wanted all that skin stuff to soak in, it’s supposed to be good for his skin not washed away. I think I was too tired and inexperienced to speak up.
That’s all. The NICU, all and all was fantastic and I felt totally secure in the fact that Stanley was in the care of these good nurses and doctors.
Mike and I stayed in a hospital room one floor below the NICU. The nurses would call me on the hospital phone whenever Stanley was hungry, which was every couple of hours, I never skipped a feeding. So after an exhausting labor we continued the sleepless nights in the hospital. Mike would wheel me up to the NICU in a wheel chair. I was still really weak, my ankles were so swollen and my lady parts were healing up from the delivery. I eventually was able to use the wheel chair as a walker to let Mike get some sleep and skip feedings. I also had the nurse wheel me up a couple of times so Mike could catch up on sleep. Walking was good for my edema. There was a pantry on our floor where we could get juices, apple sauce, ice cream and granola bars. We would raid that at least twice a day. Nurses would come in regularly to check that my uterus was descending and to make sure that I was peeing and pooping. They brought me multivitamins and motrin. They checked my blood pressure too. Our first midwife Emily came to see us the day after the delivery – I guess it was still July 6! She sat with us for a bit and Mike cried a little while telling her how much he appreciated her calm and wise advice and support through the first part of our labor. It was sweet. We told her how the rest of the delivery went and she was amazed because she thought I was going to have him soon after her shift ended the day before. We had just gotten back from feeding Stanley and we told her to go visit him in Pod G! I hope she made it up there O.K. We also were visited daily by Maureen, the director of the Birth Center. She was extremely helpful as usual. She said that babies are like pancakes, the first one always sticks but the second one comes out a perfect golden brown. She was still trying to convince us to have baby number two. It will take a lot more convincing than that!
We waited for Sunday, July 8 to roll around and give us good news of Stanley being discharged, we had to wait until after 11am to see what the doctor said after she did her rounds that morning. In the meantime, Maureen, drew up the discharge papers for me to leave that day. I couldn’t wait to go home. Plus my parents were arriving that day. Mike was at home waiting for their arrival and they were going to come to the hospital directly after dropping off their bags at our home. Mike and I went to the NICU (While my parents waited in the waiting room) and talked to nurse Lynette while she did the car seat test (He had to sit, strapped into his car seat for 30 minutes while observing his heart rate and respiratory tract.) She went over documents and gave us a bag of stuff like diapers and little things like his umbilical cord clamp and blood pressure cuff. Once we did that we were free to go! He slept all the way home and the rest is a blur.
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| First car ride! |
Read Birth Story Part I
Read Birth Story Part II
Read Birth Story Part III
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