Shedding the encumbrances

Woody’s gaining weight, intelligence, and health. There are drawbacks to this, but the overall effect is that he’s becoming more and more baby like and less and less patient-like.

Health-wise, the big theme of the last week and a half is the shedding of medical devices and medications. We’re down to three medications, with the phasing out of Lasix (last Saturday the 21st) and then the Diuril (Saturday the 28th) and the potassium chloride, which was to keep the electrolytes up while the Lasix blasted them out of his body. So now all he’s on is his prophylactic antibiotic, which we hate because it’s so gross that he almost always barfs it up, his Prevacid (for the reflux), and the nebulizer, which is for his lungs. Also, we got the go-ahead to take him off of his monitor too, which is a relief because it is a major pain in the ass to deal with, and we’ve more or less gotten over the fear that he’d stop breathing in the middle of the night.

I mean, the only time he has stopped breathing, both in the hospital and at home, has been right after he ate, when he puked. As long as we’re not putting him to bed and then falling asleep immediately after, this isn’t very likely. And when we wake up in the middle of the night to feed him we’re not giving him the giant bottles that get him so full that he pukes anyway, so it’s not very likely that this will happen.

Our next big step is the oxygen. He is on such a tiny amount of oxygen—1/8th of a liter—that it’s almost not worth much to keep him on it anyway. Not only that, but there have been some isolated incidents where he’s been off the oxygen inadvertently for a while and he’s not shown any ill effects whatsoever (the doctors told us that if he’s getting oxygen starved he’ll thrash around a bit and get the blue nail beds and lips and gums, and he certainly didn’t look like that). This has led me to believe that he’s going to get his oxygen pulled after his next assessment, which is a week from Wednesday, I think. Once we don’t have to wrestle with the oxygen tanks anymore, he’ll be pretty much a totally normal baby.

Not that this is completely great. He’s been figuring out some of the normal baby tricks. His most recent one is that he screams bloody murder if you put him in his chair or in bed, even if he doesn’t need anything, just to coerce us into picking him up. You pick him up and hey presto! he’s totally fine again. Yesterday I was making some dinner, and I realized he was watching my loud and bright t-shirt. He had been pretty fussy before that, but for whatever reason he sure liked watching me move around. The next thing I knew, I was doing a little jig in the kitchen like that one scene in “Babe” where Farmer Hoggett dances around to cheer up the pig, and Woody was smiling and watching the whole thing. It’s amazing the silly things parents will do to keep their kids a little bit quieter.

This last weekend we had a very nice visit from Granddad and Mimi Hobbs. They kindly watched the kid on Saturday so that Maggie and I could go catch a movie. We are still not very worried about leaving the kid with trusted caregivers. I think it’s because we’ve been forced, from the first night, to rely on other people to watch him and to just let them do it, which has shielded us from having to call back home every half hour or any of those other cliché things that new parents do. It was sure nice to get out.