New Room!

Miles upgraded to a room in the Acute Care Nursery! Basically there is a hierarchy of nurseries within the NICU. Intensive Care Nursery, or ICN, is where he was previously and this is the nursery for the babies who require the most care. Usually these babies are hooked up to ventilators or are unable to feed and require nutrition through umbilical lines or IVs. The next step up is the ACN, where Miles is now. This is for babies who are line free and off the ventilators. Miles got his last IV out this morning, so now he is completely off of all fluids. They are starting to nipple feed him some, but the feeding tube is still there as backup when he won't take to a bottle. As I mentioned in the last entry, the nurses have started scoring him for withdrawals from the two sedatives he was on, and his scores were high enough that they now have him on a drug called Methadone that should make him more comfortable as he comes down from those. After a few days if his scores are much lower they will drop a dose of the Methodone - right now he is getting 3 doses a day. It seems to be calming him down, but it also makes him very sleepy and they attribute that to him not eating from a bottle every time.

I gave Miles a bath yesterday - my first time to do it! I just knew he was going to scream the whole time, but suprisingly he only fussed a little when I took his diaper off. Once he was in the warm water he calmed down and stayed awake and just looked around the whole time. Of course, it was a pretty major scene as there were two nurses there to help me make sure his IV didn't get wet and to guide me through the best way to bathe him and hold him at the same time! I'm not really sure how clean he was at the end of it all, but I loved feeling like a real mom to him. Jeremy even stepped in at one point and washed his hair! And of course he had to style it into the faux hawk like his own (when he's not buzzed). Needless to say, Miles is a cutie and evidently gets LOTS of love from the nurses...