There really aren’t words to express how relieved I’ll be when this dang oxygen is gone. It makes every tiny thing so ridiculously complicated. Along with my detailed birth plan that got thrown out the window, my pretty little idea of attachment parenting got killed by the harsh fact of what my baby takes to survive. I can’t exactly wear him in a sling all day when I also have to be harnessed up to a tank. I do it, but it’s impossible to get anything done that way.
Mama as pack mule, trying to go grocery shopping
I can get by when I need to, but try changing the laundry over in that rig. Or putting it away for that matter. Or bending over for any reason at all without toppling right over to your death. I have this enormous staircase to clomp up and down 88 times a day and each time I have to choose – baby and his whole entourage, or anything else.
For the last couple of weeks Atticus and I have been waging a full on occasionally bloody battle to try to keep that oxygen tube taped to his face. It should come as no surprise to me that a preemie capable of yanking a tube out of his throat (5 TIMES!) should be able to figure out how to wrap his chubby little fingers around a tube that’s merely taped to his face and pull. He hates that thing with all his little might, and on the rare occasions that I take it off completely to clean the baby boogers out of it, his eyes get all big and he gets this look on his face like a whole new world had been opened to him. A world where he isn’t covered in tubes and wires and tape that distorts his little face into some weird halloween mask, but a world where he gets to be free of all that and just do it all on his own.
And then I have to put the tube back on and he screams for hours and breaks my heart.
We went to a new doctor on Friday at the insistence of our wonderful home health nurse. We told her how the last appointment went and she called the doctor all kinds of salty names and then made us promise to get in with someone on a list of great doctors she made for us. Once again, I’m telling you. There are some pretty great silver linings in being a NICU mom.
So we went to the new doctor, and her plan was to turn down the oxygen immediately, and then an hour or so before the nurse comes again to take him off of it completely. Then when the nurse measures his oxygen levels, if it’s high enough, we can just leave him off of it, and we’ll go back again on Friday to double check he’s doing well. This was so thrilling. Especially since our first doctor basically just said, “Yeah, whatever. See you in a month.”
Tomorrow’s the big day. The nurse will come tomorrow morning and then we’ll see how he’s doing. Considering that last night he managed to rip his tube completely off his face in the middle of the night and slept through just fine. I think tomorrow will be a good day.