Kid Amnesiac

Simon was taken off of the oxygen this afternoon, and has been moved to a less critical ICU ward. He looks great without all the stuff in his face and has even been breastfeeding (somewhat). We don’t want to get our hopes up, but we’d like to think that there is now much less reason to want to keep him in the hospital all week. We don’t know anything for sure yet, but keep your fingers crossed.

Simon is doing very well today, but he is still up in the NICU. The doctor has said that it is definitely amniotic fluid in the lungs.

Simon spent a rotten night in the Neonatal ICU last night. I went up to spend some quality time with him about 3:30AM, and while I was rubbing his back the poor little guy managed to pull half the tubes out of his nose and set off every alarm in the place. Not how we envisioned his first night (and probably not how Simon envisioned it, either).

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.

Wow! What a day. Things got moving fast this morning (see below) and stayed that way until Simon popped out into the world at 1:48 this afternoon. I’ll save blogging about the delivery itself for Jessica when she gets home, except to say it was absolutely amazing.

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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.