I Always Speak Too Soon

Well, here we are again with a sick baby :-(

Yesterday morning John and I showed up to the NICU, excited for another day of feeding training.  We were walking up to his area of the room, and there was a naked baby on a warming bed next to an empty crib.  I was thinking "Hmmm. Where have they moved John to now?" only to find that John was the little naked baby when I got close enough to see his face.  My heart totally sank.

His body temp was cool, and wouldn't raise when his nurse bundled him up. He was also fairly lethargic. Then he had a grade 3 A & B, which means he stopped breathing and his heart slowed down, and he wouldn't respond to the nurse to come out of it.  She had to use CPAP to get him back to normal.  These are signs of illness, so they did some blood work.  They didn't find anything wrong, so they decided the A & B episode may have just been because he had aspirated some milk.  The NNP said we would treat him normally until he gave us more signs.  They let me hold him for a few hours, and he stayed warm because of my body heat.  When I got him dressed and put him back in his crib, he unfortunately cooled right back down.  I also noticed that his belly seemed to be bigger than normal, which is another sign of illness.  They put him back in the warming bed, stopped his feedings, put a big tube down into his belly to vent, started antibiotics just to be safe, and ran a battery of tests.

This morning we showed up and he was still in his warming bed with the big tube still venting his belly, and had an IV in his foot.  He was super fussy and just looked incredibly uncomfortable.  He seemed gassy and kept straining to push it out, and was sucking on the tube because he's starving.  The docs rounded on him and said they couldn't find anything wrong so far.  His blood work and belly xrays look normal, and nothing has come back from the urine/blood/spinal cultures they did last night.  They're going to wait a few more days to see if the cultures grow, but since he's on antibiotics and still on the antifungals from his last infection, they think the illness will be gone really quickly if anything shows up.  They're going to do another xray in the morning, and hopefully if that still looks good they'll pull out the tube and start feeding him again.  I'm praying he gets over this quickly.  Other than some mild oxygen desaturations, his breathing is very stable.  He's still at just 1 liter on a regular cannula, and isn't having a hard time breathing like he did the last two times he got sick.

Needless to say, we're really bummed.  It's frustrating that he keeps getting sick.  I'm terrified to take him home since I'm worried I won't be able to detect these illnesses.  I'm also scared he's going to have a big A & B like that when he's napping and I won't notice until it's too late.  Am I going to have to constantly stare at him to make sure he's breathing?  I also can't stop wondering how he's getting sick in the first place.  Is it me?  Did I give him something I didn't know I had?  Did I not scrub my hands hard enough before touching him?  I know he's living in a germy hospital, and that it's probably not my fault, but I'm still worried.

At least it's almost the weekend.  The kids will be with their other parents so I can spend a lot of time at the hospital.  Hopefully I can find a spare minute to do at least one fun thing.  I'm getting burned out!