Alarming

When Veronica comes home tomorrow, she will be on an apnea monitor. Apnea is when the baby (or any of us, really) goes more than 20 seconds without breathing. Veronica does this periodically when she is eating. During her pneumogram (the 12-hour test I couldn’t remember the name of), she had at least one apnea episode, which is why we’ll have to keep her on the monitor. 

Today, I had to get trained on how to use the monitor. (John had to stay with Ethan because we didn’t get enough advanced notice to find someone to watch him.) It’s relatively simple to operate — at least when it’s not going off at 2:00 in the morning for no apparent reason. And Rick, the technician who trained me on it, assured me that what other parents said was true: it will go off for no apparent reason quite often.

While hearing an alarm designed to tell you if your baby is not breathing or her heart isn’t beating properly can be disturbing enough, this puppy is loud enough to wake the dead. I mean, really, if Veronica’s heart was beating properly before the alarm goes off, the noise this thing makes will be enough to make it start beating too fast when it scares her half to death. (Or, maybe she won’t notice because she’s had alarms going off all her life, but it will scare John and I half to death.)

The unit is portable (in a “carry a fairly heavy bag over your shoulder” kind of way), but I’m not sure I’m going to be taking her anywhere while she’s on this. I can just imagine what would happen if her alarm started sounding while we were in the middle of shopping. People would freak out. 

We hope she won’t need to be on the monitor for more than a month. The box records everything it measures, and a technician comes out once a month to download the information and send it to either her pediatrician (if she has no episodes) or the neonatologists (if she has an episode) for them to evaluate. 

We also will be trained tomorrow in how to give Veronica her drugs (caffeine and a multivitamin only). John is picking up the prescriptions tonight so we have them ready for the discharge tomorrow. I’m not too worried about that, since I’m fairly certain the meds will just go in her bottle like they do now. 

In addition to our training, a paramedic will be coming over (probably on Monday) to check out the monitor in its new setting — our house — and make sure we are operating it properly. We also will be having a home visit by a nurse for the next three weeks to check on Veronica’s progress. This is in addition to her pediatrician appointments and any Early Intervention services she may qualify (speech or physical/occupational therapy). I believe they also have a follow-up clinic at the hospital for preemies as well. 

And Veronica is going to be our easy baby. Once Colin gets home … ugh.