Holding Henry

Jen was Henry's day nurse again yesterday. The pod was incredibly noisy yesterday. When I arrived, my mom was holding Henry because he'd been fussy inside the isolette. There was a lot going on in the pod. There are two babies on the opposite wall from Henry's isolette who are big and loud. On top of that, Karly, a baby on Henry's wall, had a few procedures done that made her upset. She's 2 months old and cries loudly too. She was being discharged yesterday, so there was a lot of commotion.

I held Henry was a while, but he was getting "disorganized" which is not good for his brain development. I think that the noise was getting to him. Jen had turned his oxygen flow up to .6 liters before I got there. I ended up putting him back in the isolette until things settled down. Henry got agitated inside the isolette, so I pulled him out again, and he settled in my arms for a couple hours. He did a little nuzzling.

We get different reports from different people about the levels of interaction that we can have with him. And it would be easy to choose the opinion that suits what the parents and family want to do (e.g., have a lot of interaction with the baby). Based on what I have read, I'm of the opinion that the noise should be kept to a minimum, since his brain is still laying down gray matter. Although he looks like a "normal" baby (just a lot smaller), every time he gets more stimulation than he needs, that's just mental resources getting diverted to the stimuli rather than to him laying down his neutral foundation. Basically, the research says that they continue to lay down gray matter (which is the stuff that connects areas of the brain to each other) for a month after they are born. Consequently, some development experts say that you really shouldn't overstimulate (e.g., sing, throw a lot of words at) babies even when they full-term. You should wait a month before singing to them (by then, most of the gray matter has been laid down). It would also be easy for people to misread the saturations levels and assume that if Henry's sats are OK, then he can be stimulated. But this is also a mistake. Just because he is tolerating interactions doesn't mean that he doesn't need rest and quiet time. The nurses often tell parents that they shouldn't use the monitors as a guide to their babies. And yet, I think that this is often what some nurses do (e.g., the babies' alarms in the pod aren't going off, so let's have a gossip session right next to the sleeping babies). By some nurses, I am by no means including Joyce, Kathy, and Holly in that group. I'm looking forward to the return of our trio (the Fab Three) later in the week.

Jeff came in the afternoon. We'd been planning to give Henry a bath. Penny was going to show us how to do it (there are ways to minimize stress when giving the little ones baths). But Henry was sleeping soundly with high sats, so we decided to wait. We put Henry back into his isolette around 6:15PM. Changed his diaper. They have stopped weighing the diapers on day shift. So we changed his diaper, but gone are the days when we get to predict how much it weighs. To make a long and gross story short, Henry made a huge mess while Jeff did the changing. It involved me having to wipe down the side of the isolette. Changing Henry will be so much faster and easier when we don't have the restricted movement that comes from changing a baby through port holes.

We returned around 9:30PM. Ashley was his evening nurse. After we changed his diaper, Ashley weighed him at 1550 grams. Henry was pretty darn fussy during the diaper change and weighing. He stopped crying when I took him out of the isolette and handed him to Jeff. But he was wired. He was hyper-alert, looking around. He almost looked paranoid. We gave him his pacifier, which did its job relaxing him. And he stared at Jeff for several minutes before drifting to sleep. Jeff was dozing off as well. So around 11PM, I suggested to Jeff that we call it a night. Henry was relaxed when we put him back in his isolette.