I know that it may sound a little odd, but one of the side problems of being in the NICU is dry skin…and I mean, REALLY dry skin. Every time you go into the NICU, before you can touch anything, you have to scrub your arms with antiseptic surgical soap FOR THREE MINUTES. Now, 3 minutes may not seem that long, until you have to scrub your hands and arms up to the elbows for 3 minutes with soap, and a little scrub brush (they have disposable sponge/scrub brushes that you have to use). Every time you go in. We go in 5-6 times a day. And with that much soap and water, your skin gets really dry. As the nurses say, by the time we go home, we’ll have no skin on our arms.
So, on Thursday, we had our weekly meeting with the neonatologist. He reviewed the case with us, which was pretty much as we knew. The boys had progressed very well and were healthy babies about normal for their gestational age (36 weeks, 1 day). At this point, neither had any outstanding health issues and were just trying to achieve the milestones needed to be discharged. Dexter was getting quite close to being able to move out of the incubator bed. His bed temperature had been lowered to 29 C (about 85 F) and he was still able to maintain his body temperature of 37 C. Pretty soon, once he reaches 28 C and can still maintain his body temperature, he’ll be able to be moved to a crib instead of the incubator. Dexter was still only eating about 14-15 ml of formula per feeding orally. He is currently at 52 ml (FYI, 30 ml = 1 oz) and needs to be able to eat all of that from the bottle before he can be discharged. He’s getting there. About once per day he eats over 20 ml, but normally it’s about 15. Spencer is still not ready to be moved out of the incubator. His bed temperature was just lowered to 32.5 C and he can maintain his body temperature for brief periods, but not for an extended period of time. Another few days and he’ll probably be able to do it. Spencer is only really eating himself about once every four feedings or so (1-2 times per day). And he averages about 10 ml when he eats. The rest of the time, he doesn’t really try and just gets fed via NG tube. When we asked the doctor to give us a ballpark estimate of how long we might need to wait for them to learn, he said it could be as little as 2-3 days (very unlikely) or probably about a week. We expect that it will be around the end of next week when we get to bring them home.
We’re already working on planning for when we bring the boys home. When we go in, we each take one baby and do the work. We try to alternate which baby we take care of so that we both get a lot of bonding time with each boy. When we get back from our quick trip home, we’ll probably try to alternate visits and each of us take a full 2 hour shift and then take the next one off to try to give ourselves a break and simulate when we are back at home, especially on the days when only one of us is home. When we go back to work initially, we’ll be going back part-time with me working Mon, Wed and Fri and Barbara working on Tue and Thur until Thanksgiving so that one of us can stay at home until the boys are about 3 months old. Then we’ll start child care for them.
So, we’ve let the maternity unit know our schedule and we plan to shift a little earlier tomorrow and do the 9:30/10:30 AM through 3:30/4:30 PM shift as I detailed yesterday. Although it means another 2+ hour drive to get home, it will be nice to get away even for a day and to return home and sleep in our own bed. But, it will mean a short night to get everything we need to get done and get up early enough to be in Columbia by 7:15 AM.
So, I went to the 10:30 PM feeding/caring for Spencer and found out that at 9:30, Dexter had drunk 36 ml of formula on his own. Wahoo! I expect him to poop out on me (perhaps a bad choice of words!) and not drink much at 12:30, but who knows, maybe he’ll surprise me. As for Spencer, the last two feedings, he had not really drunk much of anything, so I decided with the nurse to not even try (although he seemed wide awake) and give him a break and try him at 1:30 PM.
At 12:30 AM, Dexter actually took 26 ml more! I can’t believe that he actually managed two of his biggest feedings back to back. Dexter weighed in at 5 lbs, 15.1 oz so he gained 0.7 oz. He’s still growing. Spencer started off much as before, just kind of playing with the bottle for about 10 minutes. But then, with a little nudging he started to drink and drink a lot. He ended up drinking 17 ml of formula which is a big achievement. This is like Dexter from two nights ago. Hopefully Spencer will catch on in a couple of days. What a great little bonus at the end of the night. Spencer did lose a little weight and weighed 6 lbs, 2.9 oz, down about 0.9 or 1.5 oz depending on if you use the first or second measurement that night. But as we were told with Dexter, when they just start feeding on their own, they do sometimes have a little drop in weight before it goes back up.
Well, just day by day, but today we made better progress than many days.
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