Tiny hand

Tiny hand
November 20, 2010 (one day old)

Lilypie Premature Baby tickers

Lilypie Premature Baby tickers

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Kangaroo care scare

Everything was going well for Cayden today - no brady (bradycardia or change in heart rhythm) episodes all day, resting well, tolerating his feeds.  Jason and I showed up to visit in the afternoon and after his care (scheduled times where they wake him up to take his temperature, feed him, change his diaper, and check everything over) at 3:00, I was allowed to hold him. 

He was snuggled up on my chest, resting comfortably aside from a brief episode of hiccups, and I was enjoying the moment.  After about 30 minutes of Kangaroo care, one of the alarms started signaling that his oxygenation was going down, which happens fairly often, and he usually pulls himself out of it on his own.  Sometimes he doesn't, and they have to give him a good vigorous rub on the back to remind him to breathe again.  Well this time, he didn't pull out on his own, so the respiratory therapist came over to check him out and give him a rub and that didn't work.  They took him off of my chest and put him back in his isolette to work on him.  More alarms went off - now his heart rate was dropping and they had to remove the SiPAP and manually bag him.  It was so terrifying to watch and seemed like forever, focusing on those numbers, willing them to go up.  After maybe 5 or 7 minutes, they had him stabilized again and the nurse practitioner came over to talk to me about what had happened and to reassure me that he was fine now.  She said that the episode may have been triggered by a change in his oxygen supply, maybe because of how he was positioned during kangaroo care.  Maybe his head moved just enough while he had those hiccups to put the smallest kink in his SiPAP tube that restricted his oxygenation.  Whatever it was, she assured me that it wasn't my fault and encouraged me to continue doing kangaroo care because the benefits to both him and me are so positive, but I'm leery.

Anyway, we left there at about 4:15 thinking all was stable, but we just called to check on him and the night nurse, Megan (another of my favorites), said he had another bad episode just before she came on where they had to bag him again.  She reassured us that he was doing well now and resting comfortably, but then she said something that was very unsettling:  she said that this episode was probably brought on because the prongs from his SiPAP had slipped out of his nose.  Part of me feels like, well, at least there was a good reason, but the other part of me is screaming how could they let this happen??  Both Jason and I are sitting here now shaking our heads. I guess they can't have their eyes on him every single second, but isn't this something they should have prevented?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I'm so sorry you had such a rough night!