This blog is done, thanks for listening! I have started a new blog about finding balance and peace in parenting at http://gracefulparenting.net. Please come by for a visit!
Love,
Carol
Sophia says ‘hello’ and all is well at the Ramsey house. She is at least 5 pounds now and she is just like a regular newborn, only on the small side and with a less developed immune system (wash you hands, please!). She will catch up soon enough and then we continue along for the next eighteen years or so, enjoying every day.
This is probably the end of this blog. It told our story, now we are on to other stories. Thanks for following along with us, thanks for your thoughts and prayers, thanks for helping Sophia make her way to being part of our family.
Love, Carol
Sophia is home. No more NICU. 5703 Wynona. Home at last.
A week and a half ago, Gary, a male NICU nurse (the male nurses are cool and don’t seem out of place until you have a lot of detailed questions about breastfeeding your baby, but even then they are pretty good), gave Sophia her first bottle. Usually the small babies can only eat a little, they choke and spit up and aren’t coordinated enough to do it well. Sophia took the entire bottle, chowing down like she had been doing it her whole life.
Sophia set records from that point on, taking more bottles and the breast more often and longer than they expected. I asked how soon she might come home and they said 2 weeks. I asked a few days later and they said maybe Monday. A few days after that, the doctor said how about the day after tomorrow?
‘Going home’ seemed abstract at first, they couldn’t say how old she would have to be or how much she would have to weigh. It was more about skills. Can see eat all the food she needs to to grow without the feeding tube? Can she hold her own body temperature? Can she breathe consistently, not pausing for so long that her heart rate drops? Sophia could do all of these at just 34.5 weeks old. The nurse said, “Don’t get your hopes up about that, I have never seen a baby go home before 35 weeks.” But she did. She is home.
I will update this post later with a picture, running out of time for now, just wanted to get the word out. SOPHIA IS HOME!!!!
Sophia is 2 weeks or 33 weeks old, depending on how you count
Published July 7, 2007 Uncategorized 2 Comments
Sophia is doing great! She is gaining weight, she is at 3 pounds, 10 ounces now. She is off the light for jaundice, is up to full feeds and off her IV. On Sunday she suprised us by taking a feeding from a bottle! The next day she breast fed! What a champ! This is a picture of Gary, her nurse on Sunday, giving her her first bottle. Sophia opens her eyes big when she eats, like she is amazed by how it all works.
I’m not sure what all else to say. There is a lot to say, but also, there is a lot to do, so there isn’t much time. Between pumping milk for Sophia and going to the hospital to be with her, there isn’t much time left in the day. (If you have emailed or called and I haven’t gotten back to you, this is why!) Hmm, some highlights are:
- Sophia is VERY cute and sweet. I’m not sure if the pictures can show this well enough, so you will have to believe me, she is really VERY cute and sweet.
- All of what you think you know about babies is different for preemies. Like for one thing, the nurses have use a pacifier, bottle feeding and breast feeding all at the same time. Haven’t they read about nipple confusion? (If you are a guy, I’m not kidding, this is a real thing.) But for preemies, the rules are different. They don’t know how to suck and having a pacifier to practice with helps them learn. Using the breast and bottle at the same time is necessary since they don’t have a lot of energy and they aren’t very efficient at breast feeding. Sophia lasts about 5-10 minutes on the breast before she is completely worn out. Then we switch to the bottle, which is much easier for her. Using the bottle helps her practice her sucking and the suck-swallow-breathe combination that will help her with breast feeding in the long run. So, I had to read a new book or two and ask a lot of questions. It is making more sense with each day.
- Sophia will be in the hospital until she can keep a stable body temperature, consistently feed without the feeding tube and not have breathing pauses/heart rate drops. It is hard to know how long this will take, so I focus on each day and how she is doing for the day. Mostly, she does great. Today, she is looking a little pale and might be getting anemic, since some babies have a hard time making enough red blood cells. They can help her with this, though, it’s not a big problem.
- My favorite thing to do with Sophia, well, tied with the feeding part, is Kangaroo Care. The first study about this came out of a hospital in South America. They didn’t have ICUs or fancy equipment for preemie babies. They placed the babies on their Mother’s chests, skin-on-skin, and wrapped them up. The Mother’s body kept the babies warm and also helped regulate their heart rate and breathing. Pretty amazing, huh? Sophia’s doctor ‘prescribed’ Kangaroo Care. I hold her this way at least twice a day and it is an amazing feeling. Sophia gets into such a deep and peaceful sleep, sometimes I check the monitors to be sure she is still breathing!
- The nurses count Sophia’s age in gestational weeks still. She is now 33 weeks, meaning 2 weeks since she was born and she was born when I was 31 weeks pregnant. This sounds strange, didn’t they pick up on that whole birthing thing? But the gestational age is the most helpful. Sophia isn’t making progress on milestones for a 2-week-old full-term baby, she is making progress on milestones for a baby still in the womb. For example, beginning to learn the suck-swallow-breathe thing comes at 32-34 weeks and real ear cartlidge will come at 35 weeks. (Right now, her ears sometimes stay put folded in an odd way against her head. It is very strange!) For her first year, her pediatrician will use her corrected age, which would be her real age, minus the 2 months she was premature. When Sophia is 6 months old, she will act more like a 4 month old. After the first year, she will catch up and we won’t need to do funny things with her age anymore.
- Besides that, I spend most of my life pumping milk for Sophia. Since this is a co-ed kind of blog with work folks and lots of friends-of-friends, I won’t get into any kind of detail. In general, it is a pretty cool thing, to be able to provide for her this way, since there are other things I can’t do for her now. The nurses are very supportive and if I fall behind, they are sure to let me know! My not-so-favorite part is the pumping during the night. If I’m going to have enough milk to keep up with Sophia’s feedings, I need to pump round-the-clock. The motivation for getting up is a little harder, when you are hanging out with a machine instead of a baby, but then again, the machine always goes back to sleep when I’m done. Speaking of pumping, it is time to pump again, so I need to go.
I’ll try to write more later. I hope everyone is doing well!
Sean and I have been pretty busy trying to figure out things for our family and while we don’t mean to be mysterious, we haven’t said a lot either, so here are answers to some common questions.
What happened?!?! – I couldn’t have answered this question last week, everything happened so fast. I asked my doctor before we left the hospital – ‘what just happened?’
The theory is that Grace’s placenta, which was still inside my uterus, became infected and triggered early labor. They were able to stop the contractions temporarily, but they kept coming back, then I got a fever, a sign that the infection was dangerous for me and Sophia. They took out the stiches in my cervix and labor progressed, then stalled. Then they couldn’t find Sophia’s heartbeat, they found it finally, and it was dangerously low, so they did an emergency c-section.
Now that I write that I’m not sure how I managed it all without going crazy. I think I might have at one point. Sean will tell you stories of how I verbally abused the anestisiologist for asking me questions, probably ones that she needed to know to do her job, but ones that I wasn’t able to answer at the time. (For example, when she asked ‘Have you had any pregnancy complications,’ I said ‘YOU HAVE GOT TO BE $#%@%$#$% KIDDING ME! and Sean had to answer the rest.)
After that, FINALLY, some good news. Sophia gave out one short cry. A nurse said she was breathing. They let me see her for a second before bringing her to intensive care. Then they called to say she was healthy. We had a healthy baby girl. That is what happened.
Is it weird that ya’ll are so happy? - Sean and I are by far the happiest parents in the NICU. For parents who don’t expect something to go wrong, I imagine it would be terrifying and devastating to see your baby so small and needing so much medical care. But Sean and I remember March. We remember Dr. Berry telling us she was already gone. That nothing could be done. We met with our minister to talk about her funeral. When there was a small chance that she might survive, we knew the most we wanted was a healthy baby. Grace is healthy. She needs time to grow and learn some basic skills (how exactly does the whole suck-swallow-breathe thing work?), but she is our healthy baby girl and we don’t care what size she is. We are so happy to have her with us. So, maybe we look nuts smiling all the way to the NICU, we are just really happy to be there.
How is Sophia doing? - Sophia is doing great. She is attached to a lot of equipment, which is a bit scary looking, but it all makes sense. Sensors keep track of her heart rate, breathing and body temperature. She gets some food (fluids with vitamins and fats) through an IV and gets breast milk through a feeding tube. We get to hold her twice a day, which may sound odd, why not all day long? But there is a balance. On the one hand, holding her is great for bonding and sharing family love, studies show that it improves the baby’s health overall. But at the same time, over-stimulation can be harmful. Babies her size need to conserve energy and calories and focus on growing. If they interact with people too much, they can make less progress. So there is a balance, between minimizing interactions so she can sleep, conserve energy and grow as much as possible, and being there to hold her and love on her each morning and evening.
Well, that is enough for today. I’ll try to write more later and put up some more pictures.
Sophia was born at 11:36 this morning and is a remarkable baby! She is breathing on her own and she scored 8/9 on the apgar tests, which is the average score for full-term babies. When they showed her to me right after birth, she looked right at me as if she knew I was her Mom. It is wild to me that we had begun plans for Sophia’s funeral just eleven weeks ago and now we have a beautiful baby girl!
Sophia was born at 31 weeks and weighs 3 pounds and 4 ounces, so she will be in the ICU for babies for 6-8 weeks to gain wait and be prepared for any complications. The ICU nurse said her chances of survival are 99.9%, which I’m guessing is about the same for any of us. It might seem sad to not bring your baby home, but there is nothing sad about today. We’ll love Sophia in the ICU the same as we will love her at home. It is so amazing that we got to meet Sophia today!
For more pictures, go to: http://picasaweb.google.com/SeanRmsy/SophiaMarieRamsey?authkey=csyf2KQAzN8
28 weeks is here and all is looking well! The doctors say that Sophia will most likely do well, even if she is born now. But we are shooting for 34 weeks, to get us to July 9th and the time when Sophia would need less help in intensive care before coming home. We cooked on the grill, drank a cooler of beer and sang karaoke in the living room, well, that last one mostly if you were twelve or younger. It was raining all weekend, even through mid-day on Monday, but just before people arrived, the skies cleared, the sun came out and it was beautiful.
The party was fun, but during the weekend and after the party, I didn’t feel all that good. If anything, I felt more emotional than usual and a little sad and I couldn’t figure out why. Then I remembered an email from the woman in Pearland who had lost one of her twins early in her pregnancy. She said thought she had grieved for the twin that was lost already, but after the birth of her healthy second twin, she greived again for the first. Her heart was still expecting two babies and there was a sadness in holding just the one.
I think this was what I’m feeling. It is so great to be at 28 weeks, but it a reminder too, that not everyone made it. When I register for the single stroller instead of the double or I find myself still saying ‘babies’ instead of ‘baby’, I’m reminded of Grace.
I’m grateful for the email from the woman in Pearland. This is a good time, we are going to get to a place with this pregnancy where we can let go of the worry and the sadness and feel more of the joy. For now, it is all right to feel some of both.
27 weeks is only 1 week shy of 28 weeks. It feels pretty good. I talked to my doctor yesterday and he said again that 28 weeks is a huge milestone. We won’t exactly be normal after 28 weeks, but we will have gotten past a lot of the risk. We are starting to talk about Sophia more and are making plans for the baby room. Our birthing classes start this Wednesday and I have a baby shower in 3 weeks. It is slowly starting to feel more real, that there will be a baby in the house sometime this summer.
Starting next week, the doctor is easing up on the activity restrictions. I can go for walks in the neighborhood (he said don’t walk a long way in one direction at first!) and I can work part-time from home. I asked about housework (I almost forgot to ask) and he said I can load and unload the dishwasher, which is good news for Sean. Still no mowing the lawn or lifting things, still no driving around town, but a little more normal.
Monday will be a good day. It is going to be so good, that they even made it a holiday. Sean and I are having a BBQ for everyone who has helped us in the last few months with meals, visits, driving and errands. Well, Sean is doing all the work. I’m just eating BBQ. (If we missed you on the invite, be sure to let me know!) This weekend is also our 4th wedding anniversary, Austen’s graduation from the 4th grade and the Big 12 Baseball Championship, with the University of Texas as the #1 seed. This will be a good weekend, just a few more days to go…
We went to our doctor’s appointment on Thursday but the doctor wasn’t there because he had gotten sick and had his own doctor’s appointment. I don’t think of doctors getting sick, seems like they would know enough to avoid all that, but he is a high-risk pregnancy specialist, so maybe that doesn’t help him much.
The nurse did a sonogram to get the information the doctor needed and he would call us later. The nurse knew most of what we needed, though, that Sophia looked really good, her measurements were on target and the cerclage was holding up. She weights a respectable 2 pounds and 2 ounces. At 28 weeks, in a week and a half, we will do another round of steroids and then add on as many weeks and as much baby weight as we can.
This picture is hard to make out at first, with some funny shadows. Sophia is facing the camera, with her head to the right and a hand across her forehead. Below her hand are two eyes, then a nose. I think she is pretty cute!
Here are our latest pictures of Sophia. During this visit, she wasn’t much in the mood for the camera and didn’t pose for a cute profile shot. But we did get the one on the left, in which she appears to be stripped. We asked the nurse and she said no, we don’t have a stripped baby. The line across the top is Sophia’s ribs. About this time, the bones start to harden and the sound waves are blocked, creating shadows in the picture. Sophia is still healthy, developing all the right ways at the right times. If my body can do its part and hang in there for a while longer, we will do pretty well.
The photo on the right is pretty mysterious to me. I think it looks like a dolphin and Jessica says Pac-man. Sean says he remembers the nurse saying it was a foot. If the sonogram specialist was taking a look, she could point out where each of the bones of the foot were located and if they were the right size and shape for the gestational age. The whole sonogram business is pretty strange and amazing.
OK, one more photo. We took one of my out-of-the-house-trips-for-the-week to Barton Springs for Mother’s Day. We had some lunch, dipped our feet into the cold springs and rested on the blanket, soaking in the beautiful day and the love of family. It doesn’t get any better than that.
