1. Scrubbing in 3 minutes every time you want to see your baby is hell on your skin.
2. I would rejoice with other parents that were getting to take their baby home, and I would REALLY mean it. I mean really! It is really so exciting.
3. When JT got moved to the 8th floor, he got put next to a little girl that constantly cried. There was always someone trying to console her. Her mom would come in, and she was instantly calm.
4. Speaking of other babies...
a. when we were on the 7th floor there was a little girl who always coughed. :( Her lungs were
severely under developed.
b. When we were in our last few days in the NICU JT was beside a little girl that was born at 37
weeks gestation, but she only weighed a little over 3 lbs. She was teensy tiny.
c. There was a little boy that was a twin born the same day as JT. His mom told me that she had lost
his twin sister 3 or 4 weeks before she had him, but she was able to stay pregnant with him.
5. I cannot believe how exciting it is to increase how much breast milk I pump. I started out with just a few drops. They gave me these little syringes to collect my milk in. I started with 5 mL syringes and moved up to 10, 20, 30, 60, and THEN I went to 4 oz bottles. It was ridiculously exciting, and you can bet that I have about 30 of those little bottles that haven't even been opened yet. I was keeping a couple packs at a time every time I would get some.
6. I left the hospital with a bag of about 15 4oz bottles of my frozen breast milk. Awesome!
7. Having a monitor monitoring your baby for 7 weeks telling you when he is breathing and the heartrate is very reassuring and unnerving at the same time. Unnerving because every time you hear that ding start going off you worry. JT made his monitor ding constantly because of his O2. Every now and then the ding would change to an alarm sound. That is the scariest of all. I was holding JT during one of his feedings, and he was gulping too fast. He wasn't breathing enough and then his heart rate dropped drastically (a spell). My little boy went limp in my arms. I was terrified. I started to pat his back and rub his back, and it finally went back up. That is not something I ever care to experience again. This is where the reassuring comes into play. The monitors are reassuring because you know that they are breathing at a good level, and you know that their heart rate is good. When the nurse took him off of the monitor for us to room in, I was terrified. No more beeping to tell me if there is something wrong. I think I watched him breathe all night that night. I got very little sleep. I know it is common for a mother to check on her child, but I have been obsessive about it. I am trying to get better though.
8. A lot of the nurses pissed me off. Some of the nurses understood that they needed to form a relationship before telling information that we needed to know. Some of the nurses would go on information overload with us. We would meet them for the first time, and they would treat us like we had not been in the NICU for weeks. They acted like we had only been there for 5 minutes, and we needed to be taught everything. Some of them would give us information that the others hadn't. I am sure that it was because they had done tons of research. We would have nurses that would let us hold JT for several hours, and then some of the nurses would tell us that he needed his rest between feedings and to put him in his crib. On one hand I after explanations of why he needed his rest between feeding because of his brain development made me understand why I should put him down and let him sleep, but on the other hand, I only got to see my baby every other day, and I as a parent needed that bonding time while he was in the NICU.
9. I am so glad that I am a patient person because patience is key in the NICU experience.
10. On our last day at the hospital, when we got to snatch everything underneath JT's crib, I realized that the nurses were putting mementos in his little box. We got a little super hero mask, a preemie pacifier, his second blood pressure cuff (I wish I would have gotten his first one, it was teensy tiny), and his first and second O2 monitor for his little foot.
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