It was both comforting and maddening. You would be practicing Kangaroo Care, with one eye on the monitor, hoping his sats would not drop that one more percentage point, causing the alarms to go off if it went on too long. Sometimes, it was difficult to relax. Normally, people just hold their babies--it's an almost purely emotional experience. Very preemie preemies are like tiny bags of bird bones; they feel more delicate than they really are, but they are so small and so helpless, and there are cords and tubes hanging off of them that have to be wrangled... it can be quite a production to get them in and out of their little plastic wombs.
The Oxygen Saturation sensor is on his foot:
The stickers are for his heartrate and respiration:
(look at that furry little baby!)You got used to both the persistent presence of the monitors and the constant alarms from all over the unit. When he was put onto the apnea monitor before he came home, it was a bit disconcerting because it has no numbers, just flashing lights. I kept thinking "But what about his O2 sats? How do I know if he is dropping?"
Well, you don't. The monitor contains preset parameters that are tripped if he stops breathing for 30 seconds (apnea) or his heartrate is below 90 (bradycardia) or above 200. Little green lights flash in time with the electrodes that fit via velcro tabs onto a soft belt that closes around his chest with a super strong velcro tab.
The "loose lead" alarm would go off when anything got too loose, and it was the worst sound in the world. A loud, piercing tone that would not stop until you hit the "reset" and "power" buttons together. Hideous. It was louder than the alarms that told us our baby was not breathing anymore, which I find truly bizarre.Finn spent his first two months at home on the monitor pretty much 24-7. Every three weeks or so, we had to do a download, which meant we hauled baby and monitor over to a friend's house a few blocks away because we no longer have a landline, and that is how they do it. Which I find astounding, actually. This thing costs $799 per month to rent, it's monitoring my baby's vital signs, and it's on dial up? OK.
We had a little log in which we would write down any alarms. He had two true apneas in his first chunk of data, no bradycardia, and no true fast heart rates, though that would beep when he got too upset.
On the apnea monitor:
He's still in preemie prefolds there. And that belt no longer meets in the middle.The second download, he had one true apnea and two bradycardias, though he was sleeping on either Pete or I for all of them, and we noticed no change. We began to suspect that the parameters no longer applied to him. After all, when we took him home, he was in the 5-6 pound range and not yet full term. Here he was, 3 pounds over that and past term. When I asked the apnea nurse about this, she said "We do it by age, and he's just term, right?"
"No," I said, "He's two weeks past term."
"Oh. We have him down here as having a due date in mid-late September."
"Um, no. His due date was between August 30 and September 7."
"Oh."
When the low heart rate alarms started, we thought that it might be related to the caffeine wearing off, which the apnea nurse said could take two weeks. That was about the right time frame. But when we asked his pediatrician about the parameters, she said that his heart rate low should be set at 70, not 90, so we stopped worrying about it.
After his second download, the nurse asked what we wanted to do. Did we want to discontinue it? I said that wanted to keep him on it at night. I thought that I would not be able to sleep if he were not on the monitor; I would be too worried about spells. Thing is, what we had learned from the monitor is that he does not have those spells often. They were, in fact, rare, and when he had them, he always corrected himself. He did not need intervention. That should make me feel pretty good about his sleeping patterns.
We did his last download this morning. Though I said we wanted to keep him on it at night, we wound up only using the darn thing for a few more days after the second download. After that, we sort of forgot about it. If he was already asleep, we did not want to disturb him by strapping him in, and if the leads came loose, we disconnected it. The belt was too tight, the connections were getting floppy, and though the nurse said she would have them send me new ones, they never did. So we wound up weaning ourselves off.
In this data set, he had one low heart rate, which we know to be bogus. The nurse is going to consult with the doctor about officially having it discontinued, but I suspect that it should not be a problem. I have it packed up, by the door, and ready for pick up.
The training wheels are off. Our baby is free-wheeling* it.
*references to Bob Dylan will be disregarded by the author.
1 comment:
So glad he's off the training wheels.
Need to email you. Hopefully later today.
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