Eating is hard work	We’re getting closer to getting the food in his mouth!

Tobie here: All Cole’s tests came back normal. Abdominal x-ray, occult blood in his stools, and his strep A test. We’re starting to think he does not have anything physically wrong with him, he just has baby anorexia and hates pooping. I almost wish there was something physical so we could fix it and move on. Mental phobias are a whole other ordeal.

Continuation of “I remember“.

By the time last Christmas rolled around we were holed up on the 3rd floor of OB Triage for a full week. Mistakenly we were told that the average triage stay was less than 72 hours. We were there already a full week which didn’t sit well with us at all. Being on bed rest, fighting for your babies’ lives, you do not want to hear anything negative that could cause more stress.

When we first arrived in triage on December 19th, Tobie was contracting 15+ times an hour. It took a few hours to stabilize her. The doctors were able to get her contractions down to a more manageable 4-6 an hour. We later learned that Tobie was on one of the highest Mag doses they give. Every day we saw new doctors and nurses rotate in and out of the room. Each new nurse would be very impressed that Tobie was able to function as much as she was considering she was hooked up to a very potent muscle relaxer. Once everyone found out Tobie was on bed rest in the hospital, they would bring her books and sudoku. It’s funny because of the dose of Mag Tobie was on, she was basically seeing double vision her entire stay and really couldn’t read or do puzzles.

Our situation was pretty dire. Each day we would try to keep Tobie’s thoughts on anything but the reality of our situation. As you can imagine it was pretty futile as being strapped to a bed in a strange place with strange people poking and prodding you every few hours, and only being allowed to get up to go to the bathroom makes it difficult to focus on anything else but the reality of your situation. We were living that old adage “one day at a time”. What we didn’t know at the time is it would become our motto for all of 2006.

Contrary to what you think, being on bed rest is hard work. The emotional and physical stress takes a toll on your body. After a few days of being immobile, Tobie’s lungs started accumulating fluid from not taking deep breaths. Each day she would have to breath into a little apparatus to exercise her lungs. Another problem with being on bed rest is blood clots. Tobie would have to wear these leg air message boots around her calf muscles to keep the blood circulating. While they felt good for a little bit, having them on for hours at a time was a pain.

This is a little TMI. One of our first major issues was going to the bathroom. With all the drugs Tobie was on, she was pretty backed up. Normally this would make for some great comedy, but the reality of our situation it was pretty scary. The last thing you wanted her to do was push while on the toilet. I think each nurse had a story about some patient delivering while on the can. Luckily being in the hospital, you have access to lots of medical aids to get the job done. That’s all I’m gong to say about that.

When you are on bed rest in the hospital, you look forward to anything that breaks up your day. Tobie’s family and friends would take turns coming to visit. It was RSV season so technically Tobie’s little sister wasn’t allowed in the hospital. We received permission from one of the nurse’s that we could sneak her in on Christmas. Tobie was really excited to see her. We were even going to dress Tobie in street clothes on Christmas as she had been wearing the hospital issued gown and underwear for the past 6 days (yes she changed her underwear a few times since being admitted, sheesh).

Unfortunately things didn’t go the way we planned on our first Hospital Holiday. Tobie wasn’t feeling right all Christmas morning. As the day progressed, Tobie started to feel more and more pain. We decided to cancel family visits that day as we didn’t want to make the situation worse by the high level of emotion that came when her family would visit. Tobie ended up in so much pain that day they gave her morphine. I know I could have used some at that time, but apparently you have to be a patient for them to prescribe narcotics. It’s kinda funny now how we freak out about Tobie taking Tylenol or drinking a soda given how many drugs she had to take last pregnancy.

There are tons of good doctors and nurses in the medical community, but it’s the ones that actually talk to you and empathize with your situation that make a select few great. It would make our day when we had one of these great nurses or doctors. One of our favorite doctors talked about the power of a positive attitude. In our situation it was crucial Tobie had a positive attitude because any stressor could push us over that point of no return. Unfortunately from time to time we would have a doctor or a nurse that wasn’t the greatest when it came to “bedside manner”. It really felt like these medical professionals were just picking up a paycheck. I have a lot to say on this subject, but I really wanted to write a post about how great the people are that took care of us before I talked about the negative. We’ll save that for another rainy day. The reality of our situation was if we delivered before 24 weeks, the hospital wouldn’t do anything to save our babies. We knew this. We were told this when we were first admitted. We just didn’t need to talk about it each time a new doctor or nurse would start their shift with us. If there is one thing I have learned from being in the hospital is doctors like to show how smart they are by talking. Sometimes less is more if you know what I mean. Eventually we had a nurse put a note in Tobie’s chart that we’ve been informed of everything and only to talk about positive things. In all honesty, we had just one doctor that we couldn’t stand. He was no McDreamy. We nicknamed him “Dr. Sunshine” for his sparkling demeanor (read: sarcasm).

Christmas came and went. New Years came and went. We had now made it 3 weeks. Each day on a whiteboard in our hospital room, a nurse would update it with how many weeks gestationally the babies were. 23 and 1, 23 and 2, 23 and 3. We were almost to 24 weeks. Ahh 24 weeks, that magical day in a pregnancy where your baby is VIABLE. Viable is such an ugly word. It’s cold and callous, and just down right unfair. We finally hit 24 weeks. We were given the first round of steroid shots that would help the babies’ lungs develop if we were to deliver early. Normally you are given 2 rounds. Each shot needs 24 hours to work its way through your system.

We were feeling pretty good about making it to 24 weeks. It was a big accomplishment for us. You could tell a lot of the staff was giving us lip service about our chances of making it to 24 weeks, 28 weeks, and so on previously because when we did make it to 24 weeks that reaction was: I didn’t think you would make it this long. They basically didn’t think we had a shot at making it to 24 weeks because that’s how bad our situation was. As soon as 24 weeks hit, we started talking about making it to 28 weeks. Could we do it? The past 3 weeks weren’t that bad, were they?

We had Nikki fly in from Ohio to spend the weekend with us. I had picked her up from the airport and we had dinner in the usual spot, 5th floor, room 510 Pod A Maternity. The plan was for her to spend the night with Tobie and I would return in the morning. When I was getting ready to leave for the night, Tobie wasn’t feeling so hot. You could sense something wasn’t right. I put her contraction monitor just to double check things. She had a few contractions, but nothing out of the ordinary. Tobie left the monitor on and I told the nurses on the way out to check on her in a little bit. Since Nikki was staying with her and the contraction monitor wasn’t showing anything crazy, I went home feeling everything was okay. That is until my cell phone rang at 2 in the morning.

To be continued…(again)

So all day Thursday, Cole was feeling pretty lousy. He had a temperature, wasn’t eating a lot, puking, and of course not having the greatest poops. The GI nurse practitioner called us Friday morning to just let us know she had talked to the nutritionist about a question we had. Without telling her how Cole’s been feeling, she said as long as Cole doesn’t have a temperature, isn’t puking, and is eating okay, then he should be fine. Ruh-ro! We told her the bad news. They wanted to give Cole a stomach x-ray today, just to rule out some blockage. We also made an appointment with the peed to get tested for strep A. The peed nurse practitioner said it looks like Cole has it, but we won’t know for sure until Tuesday (they have to grow it in a petrie dish, ewww).

I don’t know why Tobie took Cole to the hospital for the x-ray instead of me, but that’s what happened. Let’s just say it was a very long 3 hours, as parking sucks big time so Tobie had to walk from one end to the hospital to the other, it was raining all day long, somebody didn’t use the stroller, we actually took Cole to the wrong hospital (don’t ask), Tobie can’t be with Cole while getting an x-ray because of her pregnancy, and the number one reason why it sucks taking Cole to the hospital: apparently you have to be standing outside in the rain with your one year old son if you want the shuttle to stop and take you back to your car.

If Cole does has strep A, it probably explains a lot of with his pooping and eating. Let’s just say he’s a little red south of the border. Our speech therapist recently told us a baby is smart enough to associate eating and pooping, so if they have pain when they poop guess what they wont do? Eat! I guess I’ll have to trust her experience as it’s never been a problem for me! So, to recap, we had started Cole on milk, he got his 12 month old shots, he probably has strep A, all within the same week. Poor guy, no wonder it’s difficult to figure out what’s going on with the kid!

We had another OB appointment today. Like always, everything looked great. They did a FFN and it came back negative. So we have a 99% chance of not delivering in the next 2 weeks. We go back in two weeks. Tobie here: more news! He who shall not be named is gigantic. Right now he is roughly 1lb 13oz and is weighing in the 75th percentile for babies at this gestational age. I was not able to do the gestational diabetes test this morning because despite reading about the test, I was not aware that having a frappachino would skew the results enough to fail the test. So to make sure that result does not come back positive they suggested I eat a high protein diet next week and avoid anything with sugar. I’m going to have to make sure this test is first thing in the morning!! No sugar??! Aagghh!!

We had another GI appointment for Cole. Cole hasn’t been acting himself lately. He hasn’t been eating a lot (unless you count eating 8 ounces a day a lot) and his pooping has become somewhat of a nightmare. He’s in extreme pain when he poops. Yep, his poop looks fine. The only thing in his diet that has changed is we have added whole milk. We stopped giving him milk the other day because it seemed evident that whatever was affecting Cole wasn’t going away. Anyways, at the GI appointment they confirmed this is pretty common in some babies. They just don’t handle the transition to milk that well. It’s ironic because Paige has just done splendid on whole milk. I don’t think he has a milk allergy because the formula he received is milk based. Anyways, we are going to cut milk out of Cole’s diet for a week or so and slowly introduce it back into his diet. I guess our motto is, “if it can happen to Cole, it probably will”.

What about the dogs you say? They are doing great. In fact they love that the babies are growing up because it now means food has a greater chance of dropping on the floor. Homer and Moxie love puffs more than the babies and let me tell you, Paige LOVES puffs. Paige has also discovered if she drops her food covered hand while in the high chair it will be immediately cleaned by the closest dog.

We’ve been really amazed by Paige lately. She definitely has vision issues, but surprises you by trying to grab things you don’t think she could see. I welcome the day she can just talk to us and tell us what she can or cannot see. She’s been doing great on the non-thickened feeds. I wonder if we could have given her good old formula months ago? She’s even mastered feeding herself. She loves to grab the bottle and do it all on her own. If I could figure out how to blog on the laptop while she is feeding herself in my lap, you might get more posts out of me! I told you before she loves puffs. We’ve also tried to motivate her to move around on the floor by laying a trail of puffs. Surprisingly we’ve had moderate success. What can I say, baby girl likes to eat!

Oh, one of our readers, Karen asked about the Play Wall. None of the therapists have commented on it, but it gets a lot of use. Cole climbs all over it and loves to do headers into it! Paige loves to play with the toys that hang from it. Other than taking up a boat load of space, this toy rocks!

2006, it was the best of times it was the worst of times. Blah, blah, blah. I have a lot to say about last year, I just don’t have the time right now to blog about it. So instead of my long winded recounts, here’s a video that does a pretty good job of capturing the essence of last year. I couldn’t pick just one picture per month, so I had to use a lot of them. Don’t blink, it moves quick and it’s long, clocking in at almost 6 minutes (make sure you have gone to the bathroom before viewing, otherwise you’ll miss some good stuff).