Day 42, Saturday, December 25, Christmas Day

After opening presents at home with Hudson we went to my parents for Christmas breakfast and, of course, more presents. Santa brought Hudson a tabletop pool table that is just his size and he absolutely LOVES it. We had to open the rest of his presents we bought him because he just wanted to play with it. He had to take it with him to Papa and Gigi’s and I think we maybe got him to open one or two presents there. All he wanted to do was play pool. “Do you want to play pool with me?” was pretty much the only thing he said all day. He got way too many presents (and we haven’t even had Christmas with Jamie’s family yet!) and I think I might just return everything I bought him. He won’t ever notice since he didn’t open any of them anyways!


Christmas was a sad day at the NICU. Baby Devon passed away this afternoon. He was the 4.5 month old baby that was right next to Tate. The one they had to put on a vent last night. I know he had a lot of medical problems and had about 4-6 weeks before he was going to be able to go home. They had started having volunteers come in to stimulate him during the day because he is up all night and sleeps all day. Last week he started having high blood pressure problems but that’s just what I know from hearing the nurses talk about him. So I don’t know what happened to make him go on the vent last night or why he died today. My sister came up to visit and as I was changing Tate’s diaper Devon must have started crashing. His mom was sitting with him (which is unusual for her to be here so the hospital must have called her)and she started crying really loud. Then they made her scoot back from the bed and closed the drapes around his bed. I could hear that they had bagged him because I could hear them squeezing the bag and then a nurse came around and asked up to step out of the NICU for awhile. Then I knew it was really bad. It states in the NICU rules that they might ask us to step out but that hasn’t ever happened before – and we’ve seen them do quite a few different procedures on different babies.

I left in such a rush I didn’t bring our stuff with us. So we couldn’t leave since we didn’t have the car keys and we couldn’t go down to the cafeteria to get something to eat because we didn’t have any money. So we waited and after about 45 minutes they let us back in. There was an eerie silence the rest of the time we were there. There were a lot of extra nurses there and they were already getting Devon’s place ready for the next baby but no one was talking. It was awkward being in there but we had only been there for 30 minutes before that happened so we didn’t want to leave Tate yet. But we missed his 3 pm feeding since we were outside but the nurse gave him his bottle and he took the full thing. We left after about an hour hoping that it would be different when we got back for the night shift. I figured once the new nurses came on it wouldn’t be as awkward to be there. That’s got to be pretty hard on the nursing staff though. They have spent the last 4.5 months taking care of that little baby and then to all of the sudden have his body fail is pretty sad. Maybe they’re used to it although I don’t know how you can get used to something like that. I cried a little when I came back in and was standing at Tate’s bed watching him sleep. It’s so scary to think what could happen and it’s just another reminder to be grateful that Tate is so healthy.

Tate didn’t take much of his bottle for us when we came back up for his 9 pm feeding. We decided that wasn’t too surprising considering all the activity in the NICU earlier in the day. He was worn out from everything going on around him. I let him nurse while he was getting his tube feeding and he did really good latching on and nursing. I even felt a let down 2 different times. He definitely looked like he was swallowing and actually getting milk. Technically I am not supposed to be giving him milk when we “nurse” but I had pumped an hour before so I didn’t think I would have a let down. I let him suck for 5-10 minutes and then made him stop (even though I didn’t want to!). At midnight when the nurse checked his residuals he had 10 ml. Very unusual for him. They can have 1/3 of their last feeding as residual without it being cause for concern but since Tate usually never has any the nurses were concerned. They were talking about what side he had been laying on and debating what could have caused it when it dawned on me: if he had taken a lot of extra milk when he was nursing then he had more in his stomach to digest, which would explain why he had so much residual. I told the nurses this and they agreed that was probably the cause of it. I don’t think they were upset with me about it happening but I didn’t care either way. I was so excited to realize he actually got a lot of milk while he was nursing. I don’t have any idea how much it was but it must have been at least 10 mls since that was what he still had in his stomach. Even if it was just 10 mls that’s the most he’s ever taken nursing – and I like to think it was even more than that!