**TODO not well
Alas, little **TODO was admitted to the local special care baby unit last night, at the tender age of just eight days.
He had recurrent fits, which didn't stop until he had anticonvulsant drugs. Lots of tests have come back fine, including lumbar puncture and brain ultrasound, so we know it isn't lots of really horrible things. We still don't know what it *is*, though. Top of the list is 'just one of those things' (call it 'idiopathic benign neonatal convulsions' and it sounds more respectable), but that's a diagnosis of exclusion and it'll take a long time to rule out all the other things from a very long list.
Could well be a long haul - at least a week in SCBU, but very hard to say.
The good news is that physically he seems in great shape. Breastfeeding was well established (bit challenged by the circs now, but still good considering) and his admission weight was more than his birth weight. He's pretty solid - and in comparison to the tiny desperately premature babies in the next door incubators, he's huge and in negligible danger. His monitor does go off at intervals, like the others, but it's invariably because he's wriggled off the wires, not because of a potentially life-threatening problem.
But you can't really be relaxed about seeing your baby wired and tubed up in intensive care. Luckily I missed them putting in the naso-gastric tube, or I'd have another new entry in my 'top ten worst moments in my life' along with 'sitting listening to my week-old son have a lumbar puncture in the treatment room down the corridor'.
Will post more news as and when. I did spot an (almost certainly accidentally) open WiFi in the bed area in SCBU where techie gadgets are not verboten, but if I'm in SCBU rather than at home with **FIXME I'll almost certainly be either having **TODO in my arms or crashing out to catch up with sleep, so can't promise very regular updates. There is, of course, more to tell about the story so far but no time now.
(NB This will probably be a recurrent story and could potentially get even more distressing. Probably won't get really really awful but can't say for sure. And I can't use an opt-in filter for this stuff: I probably won't have time/sussedness to maintain the list and post properly every time, and I may also want to point non-LJ people at it as an information source. So if for whatever reason you don't want to read this stuff, because it's too much or too close, have a friendslist amnesty - feel free to defriend me with absolutely no worries or Drama.)
He had recurrent fits, which didn't stop until he had anticonvulsant drugs. Lots of tests have come back fine, including lumbar puncture and brain ultrasound, so we know it isn't lots of really horrible things. We still don't know what it *is*, though. Top of the list is 'just one of those things' (call it 'idiopathic benign neonatal convulsions' and it sounds more respectable), but that's a diagnosis of exclusion and it'll take a long time to rule out all the other things from a very long list.
Could well be a long haul - at least a week in SCBU, but very hard to say.
The good news is that physically he seems in great shape. Breastfeeding was well established (bit challenged by the circs now, but still good considering) and his admission weight was more than his birth weight. He's pretty solid - and in comparison to the tiny desperately premature babies in the next door incubators, he's huge and in negligible danger. His monitor does go off at intervals, like the others, but it's invariably because he's wriggled off the wires, not because of a potentially life-threatening problem.
But you can't really be relaxed about seeing your baby wired and tubed up in intensive care. Luckily I missed them putting in the naso-gastric tube, or I'd have another new entry in my 'top ten worst moments in my life' along with 'sitting listening to my week-old son have a lumbar puncture in the treatment room down the corridor'.
Will post more news as and when. I did spot an (almost certainly accidentally) open WiFi in the bed area in SCBU where techie gadgets are not verboten, but if I'm in SCBU rather than at home with **FIXME I'll almost certainly be either having **TODO in my arms or crashing out to catch up with sleep, so can't promise very regular updates. There is, of course, more to tell about the story so far but no time now.
(NB This will probably be a recurrent story and could potentially get even more distressing. Probably won't get really really awful but can't say for sure. And I can't use an opt-in filter for this stuff: I probably won't have time/sussedness to maintain the list and post properly every time, and I may also want to point non-LJ people at it as an information source. So if for whatever reason you don't want to read this stuff, because it's too much or too close, have a friendslist amnesty - feel free to defriend me with absolutely no worries or Drama.)