Today is day 10 of Ivanna’s life and she
doesn’t cease to amaze us. I spoke more to the nurse who was in the delivery
room and found out more about her first minutes of life and the conclusion is
that she truly is a miracle. I am getting to know her character and it’ quite
something...
At the moment she is already eating 3 ml of
my milk every two hours and pooping every day (OMG how happy I was when she
finally pooped on day 4!!!). She is fully stable all though we had a little
false alarm a few days ago.
She has quite a character, a few nurses
told me that she definitely acts older than her gestational age, all her habits
and reactions are not random, but those of a more mature baby. For example if
she pees or poops she immediately lets everyone know, her heart rate raises and
she starts making an upset face or crying. If I come and cuddle her with my
hands (they call it a “hand hug” since my one hand pretty much hugs her whole
body) and if I give her her tiny soother, she calms down and the nurse can
turn, change her diaper and Ivanna will be perfectly content and happy the
whole time. Today even during the head ultrasound she was fully calm because
she had my hand hugs and her soother.
Everyone keeps talking about how cute she
is with her soother. She absolutely loves her soother… The nurse had an idea to
cut the chunky sides of the soother and make it smaller and it was such a great
idea. The cutest thing is when she holds her soother with her hand.. it looks
hilarious, as though she holds it for dear life...
Her
delivery
The nurse who was in the delivery room told
me that she called her Clementine since her head was the size of a clementine.
When she was born, the whole NICU team was there fully prepared for a difficult
case scenario since they expected a baby that tiny to have a lot of troubles. As
I already mentioned she cried when she was born, which is unheard of for such
tiny babies (they usually need resccisitation), and as soon as she was put into
incubator she was making crackling funny noises and just laying there,
breathing, completely fine and the NICU team was like… “OK”… Hellooo.. now
what? We don’t have to do any interventions????” They didn’t even intubate her,
just gave her a mask with extra oxygen since she was breathing so well and they
put it the intravenous line into her umbilical cord vein as they do for all
premiees and then allowed Andrey to come in. She said that Andrey kept crying
from happiness non-stop when he saw that she is doing so well…
When the babies are born, doctors assign
them what’s called an Apgar score out of 10, which describes their “Appearance (skin
color), Pulse (heart rate), Grimace (reflex
irritability), Activity (muscle tone), and Respiration.
A score of 10 is uncommon, due to the prevalence of transient cyanosis, and
does not substantially differ from a score of 9”. 4-6
is considered fairly low but not critical and below 4 means baby needs a lot of
help and is unwell. So pretty much the higher common score is 8, while for
preemies common scores are below 6.
Well, Ivanna’s score was 8! When doctor was
telling me this she was WOWing herself. She said it is quite something for a
baby with 390 weight to have this score. When the baby is so behind in weight
it is more common for the organs to be underdeveloped and this is what the
doctors were scaring me with before the c-section, they kept telling me that
she might not survive or be very sick and require a lot of life support… but
God had a different plan and I trusted His plan.
A few days we had a false alarm. In the
morning the doctor told me that her inflammatory markers were up and her blood
platelets were low. This could be an indication of nothing, but could also be
an indication of an infection. In this case the doctors don’t wait for results
of bacterial cultures (which takes two days), but they administer antibiotics
right away to be ahead of the infection, so they did. The next day she also did
not tolerate any of her feeds for half a day and the doctors started to worry.
I worried a little but I knew she will be eating well soon and she is ok. I was
tempted to get scared and cry, but something inside was telling me that she
does not have an infection. And so that evening she started digesting all of
her feeds!
The reason why she is at risk of infection
is because she has an umbilical artery catheter line to get quick access to her
blood pressure and get quick blood tests. Usually doctors leave this line in
for 5 days due to risk of contamination but since she is so tiny and getting
manual blood work and blood pressure checks would be too much of disturbance
for her, they outweighed the risks and benefits and decided to leave this line
longer. They did have to poke her outside of the line two days ago to get a
blood sample for bacterial culture, this was very painful for me to watch, her
veins are so tiny, but the nurse managed to get the blood sample from the
second attempt from her foot, it didn’t work when she poked her hand… after
this she was also given extra blood through blood transfusion. It is typical
for babies this size to get frequent blood transfusions. They are so little and
even small blood samples take out too much blood, so a transfusion is a
necessity.
Today the blood culture came back negative,
so yeeey, she does not have an infection, and her blood work is fully normal.
This means that the line is not contaminated, but they will still remove it in
two days after which I will finally be able to hold her skin to skin on my
chest!
A day after she started tolerating all of
her feeds and pooping well and since then her feeds were increased to 3 ml per
two hours and she is digesting all of them.
It is sinking in more and more for me that
I am a mother. It was difficult in the beginning, I felt almost helpless,
useless. My baby is in the incubator and I can’t hold her, cuddle her too
sleep. Each time I looked at her I started crying because she was just so tiny
and fragile and I felt so much love for her still but I couldn’t understand how
I can be a parent, am I even a parent? These were the first few days. Now I
cuddle her to sleep, sign her songs and prayers, I change her diapers, pump
milk for her every two hours, the nurse lets me put cream on her and massage
her body when I am putting it on. Every time she gets a procedure, I am there
to hold her and this helps her cry less, or not cry at all, I hold her soother
to calm her down and she loves my songs, she calms down and falls asleep
immediately. I fully feel like a mother and only cry sometimes because of how
much I love her and how much I am thankful to God for this miracle. I am so
proud of her, she is strong, resilient, she has an amazingly brave character. I
sleep over at the hospital most of the nights now and go home only sometimes. When
I wake up every three hours at night to pump milk, I make sure to go and cuddle
her for a few minutes and tell her how much I admire her, how strong she is and
tell her words of blessing to grow, gain weight, I tell all of her organs to
develop properly and pray for complete health. Mother’s prayer... all babies
need it.
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