First of all, it's LOUD! I guess that's a good thing because if something really was wrong with her and we were sleeping, I would want to be woken up. The problem is that the majority of the time when the monitor beeps, it is because one of the leads (the wires attached to her chest) has come off. It won't stop beeping until the wire is reattached. In order to do that, we have to take all of her clothes off. That can take awhile and the whole time you are doing that, the stupid machine is beeping so loud (think fire alarm loud) that you can hardly think straight!
Secondly, it has injured my poor child. Let me explain... We were sent home from the hospital with these large square leads to attach to Claire's sides, right under her armpits. They were held in place by a strap that we wrapped around her chest. The only time we took it off was for bathtime. Well, a couple weeks ago when we took off the strap and leads, we noticed that under one of the leads there was a large, oozing sore! Think festering wound (that is, if you are an Apples to Apples player!). We were horrified, as it looked so painful. Thankfully we had a doctor's appointment already scheduled for the following day. We showed the nurse practitioner (at the neonatal specialty clinic), who said we should call the company who provided us with the monitor and ask for a different type of lead that wouldn't rub the wound. She also told us it needed to 'breathe' so to just put neosporin on it and keep it uncovered. Fast forward a week or two... the wound is starting to look WORSE, not better (even though we are now using different leads and have been applying neosporin each day). I took her to her regular pediatrician for her RSV vaccine and asked them to look at the sore. I explained what the nurse at the specialty clinic had instructed us to do and the doctor said, "She definitely needs an antibiotic.. this looks infected. And you should be covering it when you put the neosporin on." So sad!!!
The monitor has never gone off because of her heart rate (unless you count the times the high heart rate sensor goes off when we are burping her... thinking us hitting her back is her heart rate...). It does go off occasionally, though, for her breathing. When she has an apnea spell and stops breathing for 20 seconds, the monitor will go off. This happens once every few days. We'll go several days without an alarm and I'll get so excited. Then suddenly, it'll go off and I get so disappointed. She always starts breathing on her own again and has never required stimulation to get her to breathe again. She's also never turned blue or gone limp (things we were told to look for as signs of apnea). While we were in the NICU, the doctors told us that Claire's breathing pattern is very classic of a preemie - she alternates between taking normal breaths and then taking really shallow breaths. The problem with that is the monitor doesn't pick up shallow breathing, so I don't know if she truly has stopped breathing or if her breaths are just too shallow for the monitor to pick up.
The other super annoying thing about this machine is that we have to carry it with us all the time. I can't even walk into the next room without picking the monitor up off the floor and carrying it with us. It's worse to deal with than the oxygen.
As long as the monitor continues to go off for her apnea spells, they won't let her off of it. It's totally normal for babies to stop breathing every once in awhile while they nurse.. most parents have no idea that their baby is doing this because it isn't being monitored and the baby always starts to breathe again on their own, like Claire. But, since Claire is being monitored, the doctors know about these spells....
Whenever I feed Claire, it's always so nice and quiet and I do a lot of praying. I pray all the time that we'll stop having these alarms so Claire won't need the monitor anymore. Her next appointment is on the 27th. She'll be 2 months old then and hopefully be ready to be cord free...
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