Checking things off the list!

The single room was too good to be true after all! We got one blissful night there, made friends with our nurse...and then got bumped for incoming patients that were under isolation. Phooey. We moved in with another family whose four-month-old little boy just had the same surgery as Brandt. Apparently his heart condition was such that they could put it off a little bit. He's doing really well, too, and gets to home today...back to Montana, of all places! As it turns out, there's actually a lot of traffic here from Montana, so it's not miraculous that we were paired with them, but I still thought it was pretty neat.

We've been learning pretty rapidly that here on the floor, there's much less one-on-one with the nurses. The night that we moved into our new shared room, I was kind of anxious about leaving, because Brandt was having a really hard time settling into sleep. I had a feeling that it was because the nurse practitioners here had prescribed him a diet of 56cc of milk per three hours ("the average requirement for a baby his age"), and it wasn't quite enough for him. Turns out, I was right...he had a very rough night that night, and ended up screaming his head off for two hours in the early morning, until his official feed time came around and they gave him another bottle. 

These two ladies (the nurse practitioners) weren't my favorite in the first place, but we really started (politely) butting heads after that. For some reason--I think it's just the pace that everyone works at around here--I've really had to fight to make myself heard when it comes to things I've noticed as his mother that they've all overlooked. There's only so much that charting can really communicate, and with a different nurse every twelve hours...well, I decided that it's about time I start spending my nights at the hospital.

Last night was my first night here, and they've really got a decent set-up for the parents. The benches that they have in the rooms fold out into a full size bed that's actually decently comfortable. The only issue is that things in the hallway don't really calm down from shift change at seven until about one in the morning, so the amount of sleep I got wasn't terrific. On the positive side of it, I had no issue waking up for my one and four o'clock dates with the pump, and this is all very good training for when we take Brandt home and actually have to do all the feeds ourselves. 

Speaking of feeds, he's still downing every bottle very well, but lately he hasn't been getting what he needs to when he nurses. This is mostly because it's a lot of work, and with the extra fatigue that comes with having heart problems, he gets a little too comfortable and falls into a deep enough sleep that I can't get him going again before he's ready to be done. Because we really want to get him gaining weight, I'm most likely going to switch out one or two of our breastfeeding sessions for bottle feeds with fortified milk. It's not the funnest decision to have to make, because quite honestly, breastfeeding is a lot easier and quicker than pumping for twenty minutes and then spending another twenty feeding him and yet another twenty cleaning bottle and pump parts. But I'm all about getting out of here as soon as possible, so I suppose I can deal with it for now. We'll keep fine tuning his feeds with our pediatrician and Dr Ruggerie when we get back home, as well.

We are seeing progress as far as moving toward discharging, although we still don't have an actual date. Tonight, I take the CPR course that they like to have all the parents take before they leave, and they'll be doing his final echo and EKG this afternoon. Tomorrow, someone comes in to do a neurological consult, just to kind of get a baseline for his brain development at this stage, as babies that start off life like this often have some delays in their early years. All around, it's definitely looking like it won't take the full four weeks to recover that we were expecting!