Pink bows and pita pockets

I looked back at our blog last night and realized that it has been a little while since we last posted an update. I'll quickly bring you up through our last few days and fill you in on where we get to go from here. Claire had been on oxygen for a few days. She responded very well and had been on a mix of oxygen and purified air. We had a really good day on Friday. With that we wondered what was going to happen on Saturday to keep up with our good day, bad day rotation.

We had our room at the Rossi house booked until Saturday. We had decided early on that if there was no progress in Claire coming home this weekend, then we were heading back home Saturday to get a much needed escape from the alarms and monitors. I know this was a hard decision for Annie. There is always that expectation that when you have a baby, the next time you go home will be with your baby. But she agreed that it was something she needed to do.

We packed up our things Saturday morning and were pushing our cart full of luggage out to the car when we ran into none other then Dr. Bell himself. He was coming into the hospital to start his rounds. He had a confused look on his face, and jokingly asked if we had Claire stashed away somewhere in there? Annie and I thought it was the best thing since now he could go back to the NICU with already knowing we are ready to go when he is making his decision about discharging Claire.

When we got up to Claire's room, the nurse told us that Claire was not responding to the oxygen. Her oxygen levels had been sitting a little low and they continued to turn the oxygen up in gradual increments to raise her O2 levels. Quick med school question: "If someone is hooked up to oxygen, and you see no change in the patient each time you increase the oxygen flow, what do you do?" Well, they were to the point of writing up a whole report and doing a complete workup on Claire when they finally figured it out...her oxygen tube had come unplugged.

During Dr. Bell's rounds, he happened to mention that they may just need to send her home with oxygen. He realized quickly that he had walked into that one. Annie heard him say "home" and he was caught. But the excitement of home was also met with some anxiety of the oxygen tanks. After all, we were hoping to get away from all the alarms and wires. She'll still have wires and tubes, and from what they said, the alarm is even louder then at the hospital (sorry neighbors).

But, we are supposed to go through monitor and equipment training on Monday, and if all goes well, we get to go home on Tuesday!!! In other good news, Claire gained about an ounce and a half in the last day and she's finally passed her birth weight!

So previously I stated we were walking all of our stuff out to the car. Well, when we got back up to our room, our nurse said that they found an "apartment" style room for us and we were moving in just a few minutes. The apartment is just a slightly larger NICU room, but it has a full couch and recliner, a bathroom, and a TV : ) So now the dilemma. We had finally come to feel comfortable with the idea of going back home and traveling back and forth between the house and the hospital. But how can we leave now that they've gone through the trouble of securing a new room for us with the intention of us staying? It made for a fun night. We slept right there in the room with Claire and got right back into waking up every couple of hours.

We also had an amazing night nurse. She's one of those ladies who, in every way, is meant to be a nurse. She calls herself Grandma Lily. We realized we had heard about her before from other friends who had been in the NICU. She prides herself on making sure that every little girl that comes through her NICU looks like a girl. She makes each girl a bow that sticks to their forehead. It is so cute. It really is amazing how something a simple as a bow can make all of the tubes and wires fade away.

**Random story - Last night, Annie and I were in the process of getting our stuff put away in Claire's room and I needed to grab some sheets for the cot. Our night nurses, although one calls herself Granny, are both very lively ladies. I walked out of our room and they were going crazy, laughing about the size of this sandwich the one nurse had ordered from Pita Pit. During the middle of their discussion, somehow they got on the subject of how much it weighs and decided that it would be a hilarious idea to weigh the sandwich on their little baby scale. They even tared the bag that it was in, so that the sandwich measurement would be accurate. It weighed in at just over 1 lb.