nurses

Spoke to the nurse tonight to see how she was doing and she said "welllllll, she's doing OK.  She's had a few sat drops and heartrate dips. . . " [all of this said as if Meghan was doing not so great, had me worried] then she went on to say "but they've all been during feeding times."  DUH.  The doctor said that's totally normal and not a big deal, that she sometimes sucks too hard on the bottle or gets too much in her mouth and forgets to breathe, and it is easy to tell if that is happening even without looking at the monitors.  It is so normal that they don't even count those against her, and if that is the only time she does it then they will still send her home.  Then she said she had to gave feed the last 10 cc's (out of 50) b/c Meghan had a couple of those episodes.  That's another difference from hospital vs. home, when she is home we can let her rest and try the rest of the food in an hour.

The nurses sometimes bug me.  Her nurse during the day today was great.  She encouraged us to keep trying with her feeding at noon even though she had an "episode" and she ended up taking the rest of the bottle.  However, she gets a lot of nurses who can't get past her age and just assume she's too little and don't hardly try.  That bugs me.  Luckily it is the doc who makes the decision to send her home, not the nurses.  What they don't seem to get is that she is on her own schedule, not the "normal for her gestational age" schedule.  She's been ahead of everything so far.  Even feeding, she's doing much better than most babies her age.  The little boy next to us was born 2 days before her, also at 29 weeks, and he only takes about half his feedings, still has to gavage quite a bit.  She takes pretty much all her feedings, especially when she has a nurse who is willing to try harder.  Once she comes home, we can let her rest in between, but they have her on this strict 3 hour schedule.  Maybe what the doc said today will happen, maybe she will come home this weekend, and we can feed her according to her needs and her schedule.