Can You Feel the Love Tonight?

That is totally the kind of cheesy blog post title that Mike would use...but last night we got to see Laura really "feel the love" for her brother for the first time. Laura has visited Ryan almost every day since he was born. She loves him, and talks about "her" baby, but really didn't like actually seeing him in the NICU. His masks (CPAP and bili lights) made her nervous and after looking at him for a minute or two, she'd ask to leave. Ryan looks much less intimidating now that he only has a small set of clear tubes by his nose for oxygen. He's out of the big bed with all the equipment and in a regular bassinet.

When we brought Laura in last night, she walked right up to the bassinet and peeked in and started talking to him. We got to give Ryan a sponge bath, and Laura stood on a chair to help. She did a great job being gentle with him and was quite amused by all his little movements and sounds. After the bath, the nurse brought in some jammies and let Laura choose an outfit for Ryan (she picked electric guitar pj's that say "Little Rocker"). After I fed Ryan, he was ready to be held, so Laura positioned herself on Mike's lap with a pillow. She just beamed when the nurse put Ryan on her lap. It's hard to describe - but just look at the pictures, and you can see the love on her face. It made me really happy to see her with him like that.

Our NICU Experience

*Retroactive Post!*
I wish I would have written this as it happened, or closer to when we left the NICU.  It was such a strange time and experience, kind of like the "Twilight Zone" of babies.  At Fairview, the "Birthplace" or maternity ward is on the 4th floor.  The NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) is all the way down on the 1st floor.  After Ryan first went in, I could not go down and see him unless someone could get me down there in a wheelchair.  Thankfully the nurses were always willing to do this when family members could not.  After a while, I was making that trip up and down so often I could do it in my sleep.

The NICU was set up in a circle with twelve rooms circling a nurse's station.  Ryan was in room 12.  For Ryan's first few days, I honestly didn't go down too often unless we had visitors that wanted to see him.  The nurses and doctors stressed that Ryan really needed calm and quiet and the fewer people that were in his room, the better.  There wasn't much I could do except sit in the room with him.  On Friday morning (the day after he was born), I went down to see him and the nurse on duty asked if I wanted to hold him.  I pretty much lost it, started crying immediately.  There's probably not a ton of new moms who have a baby and then have to wait 24 hours to hold him, and I honestly wasn't expecting that I was going to be able to for a while. It was tricky to get him out of his little bed and hold him with all his medical equipment, but it still helped me feel a little more like his mom.  His oxygen saturation levels went up and stayed high while I had the chance to hold him.

Laura came to visit nearly every day but really didn't like to see Ryan.  The CPAP mask covered a lot of his face, and Laura is not a fan of masks.  She would peek at him and ask to go out of the room, so I would spend time walking around the unit with her while Mike got some time in with Ryan.  They had a family room there with books, coloring books, and crayons, so Laura would ask to go in there.  There was also a little nook with snacks and drinks in a fridge for parents, which was a really nice thing to have access to.  

I was discharged from the hospital on Monday, May 14, but was able to stay there until the 21st when we brought Ryan home.  Fairview calls it "bed and board," and they provide a room free of charge so parents can stay and be close by to the NICU.  It was a wonderful thing; driving back and forth all the time would have been really difficult and more stressful than things already were.  I can't imagine how hard it is on families that have kids in the NICU for months.  Mike stayed at home and worked and continued to bring Laura to daycare.  I would spend the mornings with Ryan, waiting for the doctors to do rounds and get information about Ryan's progress (or lack thereof on certain days).  In the afternoon, often Mike or my mom would pick me up and bring me home for a few hours so I could be with Laura and have dinner with my family.  Then Mike and Laura would bring me back to the hospital, we'd visit Ryan, and say goodbye.  This was so hard every night, and quite often ended up with Laura or me crying, usually both!  Mike was a trooper driving back and forth all the time, dealing with the separation trauma, and mostly single-parenting Laura.

Once I was able to breastfeed Ryan, I was pretty much making the trip downstairs every three hours.  I usually pumped the midnight feeding and sent it down to the NICU, but would frequently go down for the 3am feeding.  It's strange walking the halls of the hospital in the middle of the night, but the NICU was always busy and there were always nurses around to talk to.  I would spend most of my feedings watching Ryan's monitors to see his oxygen saturation levels.  89 was the magic number...if his levels dropped below 89, a little dinging sound would go off in his room and at the nurse's station to alert them.  You could sit there and literally hear that noise from one of the rooms every couple of minutes or so; it was the soundtrack of the NICU.  It felt peaceful to be there though, my room upstairs was so lonely and quiet.

We learned quickly that progress is slow and Ryan's growth and recovery takes time.  Every tiny milestone was celebrated and the nurses would get excited right along with us.  They were great cheerleaders for him.  This is already long enough, so I won't explain each milestone, but these are the things we celebrated:

May 14 - CPAP machine removed, switched to high flow nasal cannula
May 15 - Switched to low flow nasal cannula, taken off bilirubin light, 1st attempt at breastfeeding (successful!)
May 16 - Ryan's 1st bath, Laura gets to hold Ryan
May 17 - 1st bottle, IV taken out
May 19 - Taken off oxygen, sleeps/feeds on demand
May 20 - Removed pulse oximeter, other sensors
May 21 - We take Ryan home!

Nurses are amazing people.  Ryan's nurses in the NICU were phenomenal.  They cheered him on, they helped us see the positive steps and progress he was making when it didn't seem like much.  They recognized and appreciated his personality - even though his feisty attitude made their job more difficult.  They cared about our whole family, asked about and looked after Laura, brought me Kleenex when I cried, pushed the doctors for what they thought he needed, and more.  I was so sad to leave them because they took such good care of Ryan and the rest of us.  Of course we didn't want Ryan to have to be there, but we were glad we had a great team in the NICU.

Mother's Day With My Kids

Today was about the nicest Mother's Day anyone in my position could ask for. I continue to feel better and heal every day, and moving around is much easier. Every time I visited the NICU today, I walked down there on my own. I got to have breakfast in bed this morning...courtesy of hospital cafeteria room service! This morning Mike and I were able to be involved in Ryan's "cares" - Mike assisted in taking his temperature (easier said than done...he kept punching his little arm around), and I was able to change his diaper. It felt good to be able to do something to help him. We also listened in on rounds as the neonatologist, nurses, and neonatal nurse practitioner discussed his plan of care for the day. They are feeding him a little breast milk with a syringe and tube and trying to reduce his oxygen when he is showing signs of improvement. We asked if we'd be able to hold him and were told to return at 6pm when they'd have him out to weigh him.

Ryan greeted me at 6 with a poopy diaper. After I helped to change him, our nurse handed him over, tubes and all, so I could have a little skin-to-skin time with him snuggling on my chest. Best Mother's Day gift of all! It was only the third time I've held him. He settled and rested calmly, they were able to turn down his oxygen a bit and his oxygen saturation levels rose to 100%. Even Laura was interested in getting a little closer to her brother and talking to hima bit. Reluctantly, I handed Ryan off to daddy and he continued to do a great job. We were able to take a lot of pictures and we all look so happy to be holding him and seeing our son doing so well. I am one content mother tonight; it's amazing how much better that moment made me feel. My other sweet child picked out a pink flower with a purple ribbon at church today for me. I miss all the fun and love I get from Laura, and so we did spend some time tonight snuggling in my hospital bed ("Can I push the buttons, mom?"). It will be good to be at home a bit starting tomorrow and feel like I am "mothering" her once again, although her daddy-o and grandparents have been doing a wonderful job taking care of her.

Ryan's Birthday and Birth Story, May 10, 2012

Needless to say, we were not expecting to have a baby on May 10 or any time close to that date!  I went to bed on Wednesday night with no signs something was coming...didn't feel strange, wasn't nesting like crazy, it was just a normal night.  Mike and I watched some tv together and went to bed sort of late.  We had been sleeping maybe about an hour, and I woke up at 12:30 a.m. to my water breaking.  This never happened with Laura, so that was something new...but I was pretty sure about what was going on.  Poor Mike was all confused; he thought it was morning and we had overslept our alarms.  NOTHING was ready - although I had made a list of what I wanted to pack for the hospital.  So I called in to the doctor and started to pack up, and Mike called his parents to come over.  We were pretty nonchalant about getting to the hospital, both taking showers, trying to get everything in order.  I wasn't having any contractions so I wasn't too worried about rushing.

Before we left, I was pretty sad about Laura.  We hadn't really had any sort of a remarkable night the night before, and I was feeling bad that we hadn't really had a special last night as a family of three.  When I came back home, she wasn't going to be my baby anymore.  It was hard to leave her.  I did ask Mike to take some pictures of me before we headed out, since we hardly took any "belly pictures" the way we did when I was pregnant with Laura.  By this time it was 2 a.m., and we made good time getting to the hospital.  

Once we arrived at labor and delivery, I changed into my lovely hospital gown and was hooked up to monitors (this felt like routine since I had done this twice previously in the last couple of months).  They had to do some checks to verify that I was indeed in labor, and then the whole process could start to move along.  I asked the nurse how soon they might start the c-section, and she told us an hour!  This kind of freaked us out a bit...3 hours ago we thought the baby was 3 weeks away, and now we'll be meeting our baby in an hour?!  However, an emergency appendectomy took priority and we ended up having to wait a while.  My contractions were becoming more noticeable and I was nervous that they would start getting really painful before they could get me in to surgery and do the spinal block.  They stayed under control, and a little after 6 a.m., I was wheeled down to the O.R.

Mike had to leave me at that point to wait for a while, and I did start crying and worrying that things would not go well.  I really don't remember anything about the prep for the procedure when I had Laura, so I didn't feel like I knew what to expect.  The surgeon was not the OB that we had scheduled, but I liked her and she turned out to be just fine, so that was a relief.  There was some really twangy country music on in the O.R. when she came in, and she told them they were going to have to change the music because that just wasn't going to work!  The anesthesiologist did the spinal block, they put up the drape, and started the procedure all before Mike came in.  I felt much better once he was there, although the effects of the block were weird and I was feeling numb all up my back and into my face.  The process is so strange because you know they are cutting you open but you can't feel a thing.  Finally, they were ready to pull the baby out at 6:34 a.m.  Just like last time, they let Mike tell me the news, and this time we found out we were parents of a son!

I don't think either of us were very surprised; we were both kind of thinking that's what he would be.  They asked right away if we had a name for him, and we told them it was Ryan.  I couldn't see them checking Ryan over but I do remember that he was rather quiet - even though he cried, it wasn't much.  At some point later on in the morning a nurse said he scored a 7 on the Apgar test.  He was 20.5 inches long and weighed 6 lbs., 15 oz.  Mike brought him over for me to take a look after they were done cleaning him up and checking him out.  I don't remember at all how we got back up to labor & delivery or how Ryan got there, but we spent some time in there waiting to get transferred to our room.

The three of us had some quiet time alone in the room and we both had turns to hold Ryan.  He made this little grunting noise almost constantly, but it sounded just like a little baby noise and we weren't too worried about it.  After a while, both a neonatal nurse practitioner and my doctor came by to take a look at Ryan.  They talked about how "wet" his lungs sounded and they were concerned about the grunting noise.  Rather than getting us to our new room, they decided it would be best to have Ryan checked out and monitored for a short time in the NICU.  They wheeled me all the way down there in the bed, and showed us how they were going to hook Ryan up to some monitors.  We left him down there and headed up to my new room to get some rest, since we really hadn't slept at all the night before.

Mike and I both took naps, and by the middle of the afternoon I was a little perplexed that we hadn't heard from anyone in the NICU about how Ryan was doing.  I called down there and they said that we could come down and see him.  Mike went down right away and I was able to head down a while later when a nurse was able to wheel me down.  As soon as I got into Ryan's NICU room, I could tell things weren't right.  Mike looked really serious and told me that things were much worse than they had presented to us in the morning.  We were baffled because it was presented to us as a quick check and nothing to worry about when we left Ryan there, and now all of a sudden they were telling us we'd probably be leaving the hospital without our baby.  A chest x-ray showed a lot of fluid in his lungs, and also that his lungs were either underdeveloped or he had an infection.  He had all sorts of wires and sensors attached to him, as well as a CPAP mask that covered much of his face.  This was scary and not at all what we expected.

Later on in the day, Mike's parents brought Laura to the hospital to meet her brother.  We knew it wasn't going to be the way we had imagined, but tried to explain to her that Ryan was sick and he had some machines to help him breathe.  She was interested to see him, but scared by his mask and all the equipment. Laura was still proud to be a "big sister," and as Papa George & Grandma Nels, Grandma Barb & Bapa, Mike, Kaitlin, and Matt came to visit, she was excited to show them "her baby."  Instead of being able to hold Ryan, all our visitors could do was look at him in the dark room as his monitors beeped away.  We went to bed that night wondering what the next few days would bring.