Tuesday, we checked out of the hotel and returned to the hospital. They still were not quite sure about how many discharges there were going to be. If there was only going to be one or two, they wanted to be careful not to have what happened to us last night, happen again (having to ask us to leave very abruptly). We spoke with the Maternity unit manager and told her about the hotel situation. We explained that we were comfortable if we had to go down to Lancaster and were grateful if they had room, but prepared if they didn’t.
When we went in to see the boys, we found that Dexter had surprised us and had drunk 28ml of 52 ml in the morning feeding. Go, Dex! Spencer had not been bottle fed again. But Spencer was having a little problem with spitting up a part of each meal. The burp cloths under his head were both stained. The doctor reviewed this and said to just leave his level stable at 50 ml (he had gone up to 44 ml in the evening and 50 in the morning) for the time being. So, Barbara took to cleaning and feeding Dexter. And he decided to have a three-diaper diaper-change. Every time Barbara would clean him, he would make a mess of the new diaper. At least he was doing it in the diaper! I did Spencer and while he was good on the diapers, he decided to share part of his lunch with Daddy, all over Daddy’s shirt. He definitely wanted me to experience all there was to experience of fatherhood. But, Dexter ate 17 ml for Barbara and Spencer ate 12 ml for me.
Then the big surprise of the day—without telling us, the unit manager had made arrangements for us. It turns out that down the hall from the maternity ward is the pediatric ward. The pediatric ward only had a couple of rooms in use and they were willing to have us stay in one of the empty rooms. The room only had one bed, but they put a cot into the room and we were just grateful to once again be staying in the hospital and we were just down the hall from the maternity ward. They said the room would be ready for us after dinner. Wow, talk about above and beyond the call of duty! They just continue to surprise us with their generosity and caring at this hospital.
So, our current schedule is that Dexter has feedings every three hours at 12:30, 3:30, 6:30 and 9:30. Spencer is one hour behind that schedule. Dexter right now is only trying to feed by bottle at 12:30 and 6:30 (both AM and PM). On the 3:30 and 9:30 feedings, they just feed him through the feeding tube since he expends a lot of energy trying to feed himself. That means that under normal circumstances, we only get one hour off each three hour cycle since we spend about 1 hour on each boy for each feeding. Then we repeat. The last couple of days, we’ll sometimes not come in for one or the other feeding tube times (3:30 or 9:30) in which case, then we might still do Spencer’s feeding. But that at least gives us 2 hours off. We have taken to eating breakfast in late morning (10:30-11:30), eating lunch between 2:30-3:30 and dinner from 8:30-9:30 to accommodate the boys’ schedule.
So, during our pre-dinner break (5:30-6:30), we ended up spending an hour sitting in the maternity room waiting room. Barbara took a nap and I checked e-mail. After the dinner-time feeding, we went and had a quick dinner and then came back to move ourselves into our room. We skipped the 9:30/10:30 feedings because we weren’t sure how long it was going to take to get into the room and settled. I sent Barbara off to Spencer’s 10:30 feeding by herself. I was going to work on catching up on the blog since I was two days behind. But, it turns out the hospital’s Wi-Fi router was down. Since I had had a problem the previous weekend which turned out to be a setting on my computer (a setting that I use for work), I checked to make sure that it was a problem. But two people in the ER and one in the maternity ward were all having problems
When I went back for the 12:30 AM feeding – Dexter ate 22 ml on his own! He also weighed in at 5 lbs, 13.1 oz. He’s only 0.7 oz shy of birth weight and he gained 1.9 oz in the last day. Spencer ate 14 ml on his own. He weighed 6 lbs, 8.1 oz, up from 6 lbs, 2.2 oz (again remember, there may be some discrepancy with the cables/tubes and how they zero the scale). However, he is up 2.2 oz over two days ago (when he weighed 6 lbs, 5.9 oz), so likely yesterday’s weight was a little off. He’s also 7.6 oz over birth weight, so he’s doing great.
It’s so great to be back and down the hall from our boys.
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