Home Visit Today

I admit. I've been pissy about the home visit all week.

In our training, we got an earful about all the reasons that CPS could be called, and we have been absolutely OCD about documenting every single bell, whistle and alarm out of Turtle's monitor. We have a 3 ring binder with 9 pages full of info that we took down. In addition to filling out the date/# of beeps/apnea-brady stuff, I also noted all the instances where he was hiccuping, playing with his leads, crying, etc.

So not only am I feeling like the world's worst mom because we have so much info from this thing, I also almost lost it last night when the leads were placed badly and we had 5 apnea alarms in a matter of 10 minutes. All the while, Turtle is breathing away, of course, and the machine just wasn't picking them up. Mind you, we are not supposed to be worrying about apnea. We are supposed to be worrying about bradycardias. And I would like to point out that the last brady we recorded is from May 16.

The nurse got here today and totally put our minds to rest. She checked Turtle out and declared him a healthy baby. He's got great weight gain, color, etc. And she put us straight on a few things.

1. He can be off the monitor during the day unless we are out of the room (going to the bathroom, garage, upstairs for something). Based on what she pulled from the monitor, there is no reason that we should be afraid to have him off of it. Until the doctor clears us, he should be on it at night, just in case.

2. We only have to record the alarms that we think are really legit. If wires are loose, or we can see him breathing, it's not worth noting. NOW you tell us.

3. When she downloaded the info, she was able to show us the difference between legit alarms and not legit. We had a total of 165 alarms over the 10 days (it felt like 1000), and they are used to dealing with upwards of 500 in that same time period. Of those 165 alarms, only 5 were things that she tagged to send to our doctor. And none of them were in the last few days. The damn thing can get set off by things like cell phones, laptops, and even the electrical storm we had the other night. All of that can be dismissed. She could also show us that even though the alarm was ringing for apneas, you could see that he was breathing in a shallow pattern (perfectly normal for a baby).

4. CPS will definitely not be called on us.

I feel so much better. There's a lot of technical nonsense that she went into as well, but bottom line - he's growing out of this. According to the nurse, the patterns she saw are perfectly typical of a healthy, 3 week old baby, and that makes our upcoming appointment to the pediatrician so much more bearable.

And now we can enjoy Turtle a little bit more. It's nice to be able to just pick him up and snuggle him without having to watch out for wires or screwing up his leads. I am breathing so much easier now.