Sweet Zoë

First of all, Miss Zoë is three weeks old, in the world, today and she hit a whopping two pounds! Hooray! She’s also been moved to a new room in the NICU. Now that she’s proven herself stable she moves to room 3 from room 4. It’s away from the construction and they rarely admit babies directly into room 3, so ideally there will be less hullabaloo to upset our delicate flower.

Unless she’s the one CAUSING the hullabaloo.

This morning we got there shortly after her usual “maintenance” which always upsets her and causes her to desat, or drop her blood oxygen levels. Normally, though, she brings them back up within a few minutes and eventually stabilizes. Not this morning. We want her to be no lower than 82% and ideally in the low 90s. She was in the 50% range. The nurse tried repositioning her, suctioning her, giving her a sedative, increasing her oxygen level from the very nice 30% she’d been at all night higher and higher until she hit 100%, but nothing worked. On the plus side, Zoë’s color was good, her heart rate never budged, and she wasn’t fussing. An x-ray ruled out a pneumothorax, showed lungs that had improved since the last x-ray three days ago, and a respirator tube that had gotten shifted around. They repositioned the tube and Zoë’s O2 levels went back up. As we left the NICU, they were weaning her back down off the oxygen so hopefully she’ll be back at 30% before too much longer.

Mama needs a sedative of her own now. Mechanical issues are preferable to health issues, but until you can figure out the cause, they’re pretty damn scary.