Stalking the nurses

Notwithstanding yesterday's rant against the lactation specialist, Maggie and I are generally very happy with the care that Woody has gotten. As I have become more and more aware of the various types of things that happen to him, I have become both more picky and more outspoken about who watches him and what happens on various nurses' watch. Nurse M and Nurse S, whom I both think are awesome, signed up right away to be 'primary' nurses for Woody, which just means that when they come on duty they are automatically assigned to him. However, both of those are night nurses, and so Maggie and I decided that to ensure a good amount of continuity, we wanted to try to get a few nurses that we really trusted come on and be primary nurses for him in the day, too. Our insidious plot of selective compliments and in a couple of cases, outright asking, has gotten another one or two to get themselves on Woody's side as either a primary or a "friend", which is a less formal version of the primary program.

Mainly what we want to avoid is the scenario we had a couple of weeks ago where a nurse that wasn't familiar with Woody got asked to watch him right before he had a cranky spell, and who seemed to freak out that he was spiraling into some kind of terrible episode, when it appeared to me not that out of the ordinary. We like our nurses to know who they're dealing with. With only a couple of exceptions, I haven't had to meet a 'new' nurse in a while, so I'm really not that worried about it.

In Woody news, he is up to full feedings now, and is getting the milk fortified with a few extra calories and some extra nutrients, because preemies need even a little more than breast milk can offer them in the way of, for example, calcium and iron. He seems to be handling the food pretty darn well. And in the best bit of news in a while, Woody got his one month followup brain scan yesterday, which showed that he still didn't have any brain bleeding and that his brain continues to develop normally. One of the nurse practitioners told me last week that they also do those ultrasounds because a minority of preemies have neurological problems that they have linked to the development of benign cysts in the brain after a month. Ever since she told me about that, I've been worried about THAT too, but his cranium remains clean.

I remain very sanguine about the Woody progress. Now if we could just start seeing some positive movement on his lung development.