Straight, no chaser

Caffeine! Calvin is getting some caffeine as we speak. Today felt like a half step backward, at least for two anxious parents. He kept having the heart rate drops (bradycardia, if you want to google it) that have been occurring each day, but more frequently, and his oxygen saturation was maybe a bit low. His respiration continues to be rapid- in the afternoon a blood test showed that his CO2 levels have been creeping up over the last 24 hours, and the nurses taking care of him said that he looked like he was working pretty hard on his breathing.

Sounds scary, but one thing (of several things) I've come to accept over the last week is that I need to recalibrate my definition of 'scary'. There are alarms going off constantly in the NICU, and most of them seem to be in the 'expected for preterm babies' category. So, in the absence of any real sense of alarm from the healthcare folk, we feel ok. Having him come out for some skin-to-skin bonding helped the mood.
Back to the caffeine: it's supposed to help him out with the bradycardia and maybe get the breathing a little more under control. The coffee in the hospital coffee shop (The Metropole) oscillates between tolerable and revolting- hopefully the pure caffeine is of higher quality.

On the good side of things: he's off his IV, he didn't pee all over the place when I changed him this time, and the nurse watching over him today was awesome.

Sam is Home

Hi everyone. It's Sam, signing back onto the world wide web. It's been one heck of a week and I am so grateful for all the emails, texts, and messages of love, support, and prayers. They helped me get through an extremely difficult week and I can't thank you enough for all the words of encouragement.

I was discharged from the hospital today and I will forever be grateful to the midwives and nurses of Ninewells Hospital for letting me stay close to Calvin for 6 nights. It was extremely difficult for me to leave him tonight but I know he is in great hands and I will see him tomorrow morning. I can't wait.

Oh, and Calvin says "Hi".

Neonatal nerdiness

Within about five seconds of me telling my parents that they were grandparents, my dad pointed out that Calvin's birthday, 3/3/09, is a square root day. I was reminded of this in an email from an engineering friend today. Also, I had somehow failed to notice until today that hanging in the lobby of the NICU is a certificate noting that a star in Scorpius has been named 'Neonatal Unit Ninewells'. This is fantastically nerdy.

Calvin is breathing on his own now. His respiration is kind of rapid, and he continues to have one or two of those moments where his heart rate plummets each day ('wee drops', the nurse called them), but he still seems to be heading in the right direction. Other happenings today: we changed him on our own and he peed all over the place, Sam learned to feed him with the feeding tube, and he came out for a little bonding. I got to hold him for the first time- we bonded so well he kind of stuck to me a little bit.
I don't usually wander the wards with my shirt undone, that was to keep him warm. Also, Sam is coming home tomorrow! Baby steps toward normalcy...

Busy day in the NICU

There was a lot of activity last night in the intensive care unit. Sam was visiting Calvin when they (the staff, not Sam) were told to get ready for two new arrivals. She said it was interesting to see what it must have been like when they were preparing for Calvin -- and the three other early babies that were born that day. It's almost a full house in there now.

Today went well- they took Calvin off the CPAP machine while changing him, and left it off for a while to see how he'd get on. This let us have a look at his face without tubing in his nose. Blood tests seemed to show that he was doing fine without it, and when I left he'd been breathing on his own for six hours or so. They're guessing that he'll get tired or otherwise need to go back on it later, but he's started the process of taking care of breathing independently.

He hates getting his nappy changed (we'll probably call them nappies just to fit in with the healthcare people, but I don't like the word), kicking and screaming to the point of the nurses warning each other. It's not an effective tactic since he has about half a pound of muscle, but it leaves him agitated. Fact I did not know last week: you can apparently calm down preterm babies with great success via a hand on the head and a hand on the rump, and a hand on the head works with Calvin:
Also, his hands are still small, though the signs are pointing toward him following the Nick tradition of long, graceful, almost aristocratic fingers:

An uneventful day

After his fitful day yesterday, Calvin was able come out and be held by Sam for a while when she wandered over in the middle of the night to see how he was doing. He's handling his introduction to milk with no problem, and there's been no sign of infection, so he can stop getting the antibiotics. He remains on the CPAP for now, and right before I left for the day he had a moment where his heart rate and oxygen saturation dropped. They gave him some time to see what he would do, and he got back up to speed without being prodded this time. The doctors and nurses have all been patiently explaining what they're doing and showing us all the data they're collecting. In fact, everyone that we've encountered at the hospital over this last week has been very helpful and understanding, notably the shifts of midwives who were (and are) taking care of Sam. Ninewells hospital would get our official seal of approval if we had one.

The plan is for Calvin to be a champion mountain bike racer. Here's Paul thinking about his training regimen:

Day two

Today was a pretty decent day for Calvin. We went and saw him quite a few times, and Grandpa Paul arrived around noon and was pleased with what he saw. Quote of the day: "once you get past the fact that he's small, he's really quite cute".

Calvin is doing alright. He was fed his first drops of milk today (by fed, I mean pushing the plunger on a syringe), so that's good. He had a few episodes during the night and day when his heart rate slowed and oxygen saturation dropped- most of the time he was back in the swing of things after a bit of prodding, but a couple times they had to boost the oxygen in the air he's being given. Because of these blips it was decided not to have him out of the incubator for a repeat of yesterday's bonding time. So we didn't get to hold him today, but I held him up in the incubator while he was having his sheets changed, which was the first time I've done more than kind of hold onto his hand:
and here are two pictures after he was changed. He looked pretty comfortable after that, which was nice to see.


One of my long-standing disappointments about myself is that I'm a tremendous wimp when I see blood drawn. Cuts I'm fine with, but show me a vial filling up in a controlled medical setting and I get queasy. Today I discovered that filling a tiny vial from a prick on a baby's heel brings up the same reaction. Sad.

Sam says hi to everyone- while she doesn't have any internet access yet, I've loaded up your emails from the last few days on my laptop to show her in the morning, and they've really helped cheer her up in some gloomier moments.

Calvin Ajax Moeckel!

Whew. Neither of us got much sleep last night, Sam lying awake in the hospital and me kind of lying there in bed with startling images flashing before my eyes. This morning we were told that Sam would probably get a chance to hold Calvin for the first time in the afternoon, which was a pretty huge boost. The initial shock of seeing all the tubes and wires had worn off a little, but it was a pretty a helpless feeling only really being able to stick you hand in the incubator to touch him. Here are a few pictures of Team Moeckel the Next Generation from the afternoon.

First real mother-son contact:

A family self-portrait of exhaustion:


Mid-squawk, being put back in the incubator:


As you can see, he's got some filling out to do, and it's not really a whole lot of fun with the tubes and wires all over the place. It's going to be stressful going for the next while, but it was really great to see him resting with Sam for those few minutes. Hopefully, in the end, this episode will just make the first chapters of his biographies a little more interesting, and make his future world-dominating exploits all the more impressive.

For the next few months, our life is going to be pretty focused on Calvin. I think our plan is to use this blog as a place for people who are interested to check in and see how things are going. So, whenever you're curious, pop in and check it out.

At the moment: his first 24 hours went by pretty uneventfully. He's getting some help with his breathing (CPAP), has an IV, a feeding tube ready to go but not in use yet, is being given some antibiotics as a precaution, and is getting some blue-light phototherapy.