1. Hurry Up and Wait! Hospitals are some of the slowest places on earth. We arrived yesterday at about 11:30 after a phone conversation with the NICU that suggested Simon was ready to go. Four hours later we were still waiting.
2. Information does not flow like it needs to. Especially between shifts. The nurses are friendly and extremely helpful, but they’re also very, very busy. Anytime they tell you that they will let the next shift know something that you have told them, that is your queue to communicate that piece of information to the next shift yourself. We gave permission for a certain procedure at least five times (two of which involved signing forms that were immediately lost).
3. You will be given contradictory information. Jessica has already blogged about the contradictory information you can pick up in baby literature and on the web, but on more than one occasion I actually got contradictory information about Simon’s medical status or proscribed care. This is when you have to reaise your hand, yell “Stop!”, point out the conflict and demand that someone be produced who can provide an authoritative answer. (Or you can just say “Screw it!” and wait to talk to the pediatrician on Monday….)

The Bilirubin test is a perfect example. We get to the hospital at about 11:00 AM this morning, and are asked for the papers ordering his Bilirubin test. Don’t have ’em — nobody told me I was gonna need them, they just told me to bring Simon in. So then they tell us that they can have the NICU send down a copy. Instead of faxing it down, an aide decides to walk it down — probably ’cause he just wants to get the hell out of the NICU for a few minutes and stretch his legs, but whatever. He prings down what amounts to a screen shot of the same database entry that the admitting desk had pulled up on their PC. I’m dubious, but I take it and head down to the lab.

At the lab, they look at this paper and scoff. These papers aren’t orders, they’re screen shots! Yeah, no kidding. We spar for a few rounds with the lab people, and then they say that they will need to call our pediatrician. The pediatrician’s office is called, and after a short conversation with Jessica they agree to fax over an order for a Bilirubin test. Forty-five minutes later, no fax. Call back. “Oh, I think we got the fax number wrong….”

Typically this is where I would just give up, but that’s really not an option any more.

After a trip to the 24-hour pharmacy to fill a Percocet prescription and a quick bite to eat, we got home, fed the cats, set up the breast pump and then called the hospital to get the results of Simon’s blood culture. Negative! Still don’t know when they’re gonna let him leave the NICU, but there’s no infection and really no reason to keep him in the hospital anymore. We’re gonna head back over sometime tomorrow morning and see what the pediatrician has to say.

Since Jessica can’t effectively breast feed while Simon is in the NICU, we’ve been pumping colostrum and sending it upstairs in feeding syringes. I had my first introduction to this last night at 3:00AM, when the nurse woke me up, told me it was time to pump and then promptly disappeared. I had an extremely frustrating time trying to clean and assemble the pump parts (having never even seen the machine before, let alone put one together), and then when Jessica handed me the colostrum I managed to spill at least half of the 3 cc on the floor. Jessica gets kudos for not biting my head off or crying or something.

We did another pump feeding at around 6:30 AM (5 cc!), and, despite my best efforts, the hospital was just too busy by that time for me to fall back asleep. So I’m off to get some coffee and to get Jessica a decent bagel.

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About two hours after Simon was born, I was watching him through the window in the hospital nursery with all of the grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, et al., when I noticed that Simon’s breathing had about as much rhythm as I do dancing after three beers. Oh, I’m sure it’s not a problem I said out loud.

Well, it turns out it is a problem, although we’re all hoping it’s the high-probability best case scenario problem and not one of the “make the new parents bawl low-probability but as your doctor we hafta tell you” problems.

Simon is breathing a bit irregularly. It’s inhibiting his oxygen intake, though not by very much. It seems that in the process of being born, Simon horked down a good deal of amniotic fluid — some into his lungs, and over 5 cc into his stomach. (For the record, I didn’t even know a newborn’s stomach could hold 5 cc! Maybe that’s why I caught him throwing so much of it up later this evening…?) This extra amniotic fluid in his lungs is the most likely culprit for his irregular breathing, and if nothing else goes wrong (e.g. bacteria in the amniotic fluid) it should clear up in about 36 hours. So instead of spending his first two nights outside the womb with Mom and Dad, Simon gets to spend them wired up to monitors in the Neonatal ICU. Bummer.