Day 17 - Booted out of the NICU!

Well, we were booted out of the NICU today...and that's a good thing...I think. They have 40 beds in the NICU at CHOW and when they start to get close to that number, they try to transfer the most stable patients to a kind of NICU graduate area on the 7th floor to make room for incoming kids. While it is fantastic that Jonah, the CDH baby, is the one that they say is most stable in the whole unit, it's terrifying too! The head of the NICU assures me its the "same level of care" (his exact words), and says that he never would have believed that the CDH kid would be the one they're moving. I personally would rather stay in the NICU, the nurses are fantastic and I know how everything works and I feel it's the highest level of care, but I understand the need to make room for critical cases and it appears Jonah is on his way out once we can get the oxygen weaned down and the feedings regular and bigger. Sooo...I pack up my ridiculously huge frozen milk stash and off we go to the 7th floor.

Except that its not the same level of care at all. Don't get me wrong, we met some excellent nurses on the 7th floor, but it's just not a NICU-level center. The nurses are assigned to more babies so therefore are just stretched thinner. Plus, many don't have any experience working with NICU babies so are more jumpy about monitor alarms. The doctor's aren't around except for during rounds in the morning, you can go hours without seeing a nurse unless an alarm goes off, and they don't do many of the things the same as in the NICU. I don't feel like I'm being unfair here, many of the parents of NICU-graduates I met felt the same way and the Care Coordinator at CHOW admitted they were working on improving and asked for my opinions. I'm simply stating here when I told her. I felt some of the problems could have been avoided by better communication and explanation. For instance, when Jonah used a bottle in the NICU, it was discarded, here they wanted me to wash it and reuse it, which is fine but when you've become NICU-ized into thinking that any germs could be deadly, its hard to adjust to just rinsing out a syringe for tube-feedings and setting it on a papertowel to use for the day (or two). When you're used to having everyone wash their hands before coming into the NICU and not having extra visitors around, it's hard to get used to tons of kids running around and not having strict guidelines (though the nurses always sanitized their hands before coming in the room!). When you're used to coming in for the day and hearing how the baby's night went from the nurse fairly immediately, it's hard to wait for 2 hours and finally hit the call button because you still haven't seen a single nurse stop in. When you're used to seeing de-sats (where the oxygen saturation level dips below 90%) from time to time and you've been told by respiratory that as long as the baby self-corrects, its nothing to be concerned about, but here they immediately switch from room air (21% oxygen) to 100% oxygen because they don't want to tire the baby and they "don't do blended oxygen", you feel like you're taking steps backwards instead of forwards. Not to mention they had no dedicated pumping room (the NICU had two), just a screened off area of the room with the refrigerator and bottles and stuff, where everyone came and went every few minutes. They didn't have a big deep freezer for the milk either, so I was sharing a fridge/freezer with 20 other mothers, all of us trying to fit ounces and ounces of milk into a tiny spot.

But enough of the complaining, the bottom line is that Jonah was getting better and we were looking forward to taking him home soon (which wasn't to be but I'll explain that later). The pros of being on the 7th floor were that it was a private room (with a door and everything) where I could spend some time with Jonah and only hear our own monitors beeping and have private time. It had our own TV, bathroom, even a couch for visitors to sit on (and pulled out to a bed if you really wanted to sleep there). More importantly, visitors were allowed! Yea! We didn't publicize it because we still felt that a limited visitor pool was best, but we had Jonah's Godparents and my husband's brothers come, along with someone from our church. This was their first time meeting Jonah and they enjoyed holding him and taking photos, he was already 2-1/2 weeks old and they were just meeting him!