Invisible Wings

Today marks 4 months since the day Zachary entered our world. 4 months to the day when unspoken fear paralyzed me and I worried that despite all of the tests to ensure otherwise, it would just be too soon for him. 4 months since the day he was in the NICU, away from me and I worried about his fate long before I was able to hold him for the first time. Since the day we finally met and everyone in the room was silent as mother and son just stared at each other, breathing each other in after months of pain.

I'm struggling to put into words just what this little boy has brought to my life. He showed me my toughness. He showed me just how much my heart can hold, how much I love being a mother. That miracles really can happen not once, but twice, to the same life. Or is he really my miracle? Perhaps he is his own and I am just the one priviledgd enough to witness it.

It is absolutely amazing to watch his personality unfold before my eyes. Big personality in such a small packege. 14 pounds of preciousness. To see the wonder in his eyes as he takes in the world around him renews in me a sense of just how amazing everything can be. And I want to give him nothing but the best. I did with his older brother as well, but not quite to this extent. I was always more of a creature of convenience. I hardly recognize myself these days: babywearing, breastfeeding, making my own baby food, considering cloth diapering. I never thought this would be me. Zach did that.

As for Zachy's development, I refuse to allow myself to get caught up in timelines for milestones. I know he was premature and have the expectation that he will be a month or two behind his peers. But regardless, he is happy and healthy and thriving. He will do it all in his own time. As for right now, he is the most social baby. He has the warmest of smiles for everyone, especially Mommy and Daddy. He has slept through the night since about six weeks of age, which is amazing because for him, 6 weeks of age was my actual due date. He bats at toys and tries to "talk" to them in his baby language. His hands curl around his toys and he brings them to his mouth, but I don't yet think this is purposeful. When he is held close, he still curls into the ball of a newborn, with legs tucked up under his belly and arms close to his chest. He still loves being swaddled. He takes 2 naps per day. My favorite time of day is when I have just returned from a night of work and Zach and I retreat to my bed were he lays in the crook of my arm, close to my heart, and nurses as he drifts off to sleep. Long after he falls asleep and I should be asleep, I find myself awake and just staring into his sleeping face. Long black lashes curling onto cherubic cheeks. Rosebud mouth. The absolute picture of peace and innocence and beauty. And when he finally awakens, whether it be from a nap or from a nighttime slumber, he doesn't wake us. He will lay quietly and coo at his mobile or just look around. When we awaken and run to the crib to check on him, he just looks at us with the sweetest of toothless grins, as if to say "Good Morning! I thought you might need some rest and so I let you sleep in." He still only cries when hungry. He won't let you know he has a dirty diaper. Instead, he'll just look at you as if to say, "Hey! You gonna do something about this or what?" Lately he has added a new cry: the cry of boredom, to which we respond with more talking and showing and doing. And it actually works, unlike with his older brother, who was temperamental and fussy and hard to please.

I have never been a religious person. I lean more towards the laws of science. But having Zach has made question what higher power is out there, governing the miracle that is him, adding this gift to my life. And if there truly are angels on Earth, Zachary is most decidedly one of them. It's just that we cannot see his wings.

(Image Credit: http://rds.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0PDoS6Kf41MYQIACiGjzbkF/SIG=12pnnjfk5/EXP=1284428042/**http%3a//bakingwithdynamite.blogspot.com/2008/12/tasty-angel-wings.html )

Distant Memories

I found these pics while clearing my computer of old unwanted files. I took them with Zach's baby book in mind, then forgot they even existed until now. The first is my left thigh complete with the catheter that infused Brethine into me in an effort to keep the contractions at bay. I had to change the infusion site every 48 hours. The absence of other scars on my thigh tells me that this was one of the first days I had it. Now, after months of that, my legs are covered with scars.

The second was taken from my perspective on bedrest and on my home uterine monitor at around 26 weeks of pregnancy, when the contractions were starting to come at break-neck speed, every 2 minutes or so, around the clock, and I pretty much lived all of my days with that thing on my belly. Zach hated it and would kick at it every time. Now, looking at these, I can recall the first day I had neither. It felt so strange, and I kept reaching for it. It was also the first day I was no longer pregnant and Zach's first day of his life. 4 months ago today, to be exact.

I still am in awe that we survived all of it. But we did.

Move Over, Gerber!

I don't know why I did this. But I was toying with the idea of making Zach's baby food for his big start on solids, but hadn't made up my mind. Well, I was doing some volunteer work and part of my project I am working on is to organize their donations they receive from outside. I was sorting through their supply of baby food, organizing it into stages, type, expiration date and more. And I was absolutely appalled in a way I never was when Evan was a baby. That stuff has a shelf life of about 100 years. Which really made me question what it is that they put in there that we are giving our children to consume at a stage when their digestive systems are at their most vulnerable. Gross. Then there was the actual food. I actually found one called "Country Breakfast": pureed ham and eggs and hashbrowns. Seriously. Let's just start them out from birth with diabetes and high cholesterol and hypertension. Then maybe they can have their first blocked coronary artery before high school. So that sealed the deal for me. I'm a smart person. I can do this, right?

My first step was to find containers. I managed to find some BPA-free containers for the bargain price of $8 for 24. They're freezer safe, microwave safe, and dishwasher safe. Score! Next came the food. Wholesome and pure was the goal. So I stocked up on fresh fruits and veggies of every color of the rainbow. The exception was squash because (A) I couldn't find a fresh squash and
(B) I don't think I would know what the hell to do with one if I did. So for that first food, I bought frozen. To reap the health benefits of this project, I needed to cook them in the healthiest way possible to both preserve the nutrients and minimize the use of fats and oils, as well as salt and sugar. I chose to steam and boil. No additives whatsoever.

The first batch I made was the squash and carrots. I steamed the carrots for what seemed like forever after I spent all of that time peeling and slicing them. My fingernails were stained orange for 2 days afterwards. The first batch was actually pretty comical. I didn't want to cook the carrots long enough that I allowed all of the nutrients to escape, but they needed to be soft enough to be able to puree them. So I cooked them, again, for what seemed like forever, then dumped them into a mixing bowl with a touch of purified water to keep them moist. The plan was to first coarsely chop them using an attachment on my hand mixer. (I don't have a food processor because I have never had the need, but if this works out, I may need to invest in one!) Then I planned to put them in the blender to puree them from there. Well they were still too firm, and as soom as the blades from my mixer touched them, sliced carrots started flying and zinging through the air, ricocheting off of my cabinets and just about every other surface in my kitchen. I ended up finishing up by boiling them to get them to a softer consistency, and from there, the process went smoothly. The squash? Well the squash was a piece of cake and went directly from stove-top to blender with no problems and pureed like a dream.

So at the end of my little misadventure, my counter was covered with small containers of homemade baby food for Zach, cooling so I could then freeze them. John looked quite impressed that his non-domesticated wife was capable of doing this, and I was pretty pleased with myself and thought this surely should warrant my nomoination for Mommy of the Year. I figure if I do a little at a time, by the time Zach starts solids at the planned age of 6 months, I will have a pretty nice supply. And I read that they are good in the freezer for about 4 months, so I have plenty of time. Later this week, I have 2 subsequent days off and plan to tackle bananas.

( Image Credit: http://rds.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0PDoYCgfo1M2lEAJmKjzbkF/SIG=12rud72bm/EXP=1284427808/**http%3a//health.howstuffworks.com/postpartum-nutrition-guidelines-ga5.htm)

The Great Homework Caper

Everyday, when Ev gets home from school, we ask him if he has homework and if so, we expect him to do it right then and there. We do not screw around with school work at all. Period. More often than not, he says he doesn't have any. A couple of times he has said he left the necessary books at school. We get on him, but that doesn't seem to have an effect on him. On the nights he says he has none? Well, I have to trust him, right?

So imagine my surprise when his teacher has him call one day last week. The night before was one of the nights he had told us he had no homework. Apparently the next morning, in front of his teacher, the excuse turned to "I left my books at home". Since she is the one doing the assigning,he an't very well lie to her about having homework. So he calls us and tells us he needs his books. Where are they, Evan? He doesn't know. John and I tear the house apart looking for them, but they are nowhere to be found. Shortly after, his teacher calls and requests a conference. Great. We said we'd be there that very day when school was dismissed.

Turns out my sweet, highly gifted oldest son has decided to take a complete strike from homework. She said he had done homework 2 times in 3 weeks, and had not had recess since the very first day of school because of this. I was a little puzzled as to why I didn't know about this beforehand. The books he couldn't find? They were in his desk the entire time, but he couldn't very well tell her that or she would see into his little scheme. I could have killed him!

So that was the night that Evan came home from school and sat at the kitchen table for 4 hours, catching up on every scrap of work he has missed. And the night he lost every priviledge he has: tv, computer, video games, iPod, toys...You name it, and I can bet it's off limits to my kid until he can prove to me that he can manage to do the one job he has.

The Scary Part

We people who work in healthcare often do our jobs without really thinking of personal risk. I am no different. As I typed that last statement, I got a vision of me helping to load a patient into a chopper while bagging with one hand and trying to hold the stretcher up with another. No small feat considering the patient weighed over 500 lbs, and I seriously am lucky that I didn't sustain a more serious back injury other than a puilled muscle. Or I can tell you of walking into the rooms of countless tuberculosis patients, getting parts of my pinched into bed rails, my foot run over by an ICU bed during a patient transport. Skinned and scraped knees from doing CPR in a parking lot. I even got H1N1 while pregnant with Zach. It happens. I take care of some pretty sick people. What is the realest threat? Bloodborne pathogens. HIV, Hepatitis, and more. I had managed to escape. I have spent years of my life poking needles into people's arteries and yet to have a needlestick.

Until this past Friday night.

I was taking care of a patient covered in tattoos and piercings, which are both risk factors. He was unresponsive and I was told he was unable to move his left side. Yet when I popped the needle into his left radial artery, he jerked so quickly that the needle promptly left his artery and went straight into my left middle finger. The wheels of handling an employee exposure were set into motion immediately as the house supervisor was present when it happened, when I blurted out "Oh SHIT!" and pulled my hand away with my blood already pooling up underneath the latex glove. Then another nurse walks into to alert staff that according to family, they guy also has a history of illicit drug use.

Double Shit.

Of course I had paperwork to complete and had my labs drawn. They did a rapid HIV screen on the patient. It was a Friday night, so I was told that they would have to page an on-call employee health person, but I would have my results by the end of my shift at 7 AM. Nope.

Through a long chain of events, I finally got an answer 36 hours later. But this was after my making many phone calls, including to my family doctor. I didn't know what to do. You see, hepatitis and HIV are both passed directly through breastmilk. I couldn't feed Zach until I had an answer. They tried to tell me that the risk of me getting anything was low, and while that is true, a chance of one in a million is still too high for me when it comes to my precious baby.

Then there is the part that had me, for a day and a half, facing the scariest part of my job. What did I come into contact with? What if I caught something? What of my family? It was absolutely, positively nerve-wracking. And every possible scenario raced through my brain in the time it took me to find out that the man was negative for everything. Now all I have to do is make sure that there wasn't anything latent in my blood. And I will have to be tested several times over the next year to make sure I stay negative for everything. But for the first time in my career, I had to stop and think about what it is I truly do on a daily basis. And it scared me to death.

Busy, Busy, Busy

I have been going non-stop for a couple of weeks now, and thus no time to blog. Today, the house needs my attention, among other things, but I am taking some time for me. Right Now. I mean it! So what has been occupying my time?



The Illness

Zach has always had a slight bit of nasal congestion since birth. Normally it is clear, but he has been cursed with my pug nose, so it gets stuck in there. Hey, I'm an RT an therefore a pro at removing respiratory gunk. Of course Zach loathes the dreaded bulb syringe and saline drops, but I get the job done. And because of my professional credentials, John always saves it for me. Translation: I have to be the one to make my baby boy cry. Gah! Well, last Friday we were preparing to take our boys out of town to see their grandparents. Zach chooses then to wake up with a cough. A dry, hacking, non-productive cough. I figured it was from nasal drainage, cleaned him out, and we left town as planned. So we end up 4 hours from home and the drainage turns yellow, the cough starts to happen all day instead of just when he wakes. I wanted desperately to put stethoscope to chest to see what was happening in those tiny premature lungs of his, but alas my steth was on my kitchen counter at home. (Pause here, my cappucino is ready!) So anyhow, we stayed our 3 days, which would have been 5 had my boss not needed me for the holiday weekend coverage. And as soon as I got home Sunday night, I listened to Zachy's lungs. Crackles in both bases. Bad. So I made our first emergency after hours call to our doctor. They know me from the hospital. I told him what was going on, that Zach appeared to be in no respiratory distress, but with it being a holiday weekend, thought they might want me to take him for an OP chest x-ray or possibly call something in. Nope. He wanted me to take him to the ER because of Zach's status as a preemie. Blech, ok.



The ER Visit

We do as told and we get to the ER. Of course Zach is being his charming self, smiling and laughing and cooing at the nurses. They fall in love with him. And he gets his first x-ray. The x-ray techs are amazed that he doesn't cry, but rather looks around, taking it all in. He gets fascinated by the light they shine on his torso to help them place the location of the picture and his brow wrinkles with confusion when the light goes off. He is my perfectly behaved baby. The ER doc is one I have not worked with, and she asks if I have any other children, because she notes I am "remarkably good at this". What a compliment! But it turns out there is no pneumonia, and so we go home with baby in tow, only to follow up at Zach's well-child appointment 3 days later.



The Morons

We are on our way home from the ER that night. I am in a slight hurry because it is 9:30 and I have to be at work at 11. Of course it is the first Sunday in September in the Cincinnati area. If you aren't from here and know noone who is, you have no idea. Riverfest. Where hundreds of thousands of people from all over descend on the Ohio River to watch the sky literally erupt into some of the most spectacular fireworks in the world. It Is Cincinnati. John and I are usually there on the river amongst the madness, but this year, Zach was just too young, the noise too loud for him, and the crowd too maddening for me to attempt to get through with such a small baby. But what does this translate to? Traffic. Lots and lots of it. So John starts navigating side streets to get us home. We get to our neighborhood, and he makes a turn onto a side street right around the corner from my house because he cannot turn that way onto our street. His intention is to turn around in this cul-de-sac and approach the intersection from a different way. But this is atop a huge hill and you can see the fireworks from there. The street is lined with cars filled with onlookers. Our windows are down because it is a nice night. And that is when it happens: a group of drunk people decide to toss their cups of beer on my car simultaneously. And they manage to soak Evan with beer. They even got poor Zach, soaking his carseat, which was located in the center of my backseat. I yell at John to stop the car, an I get out and give them some choice words, letting them know they soaked my children with thir booze in their efforts to be funny. And they had the balls to shout back. So John gets out of the car then, putting on his Marine Corps DI voice. Nothing good comes from that voice. I know what it means. I have only heard it one other time when Evan hit me during a tantrum and John got in his face and told him that while I was Evan's mom, I was also his wife and noone hits his wife and gets away with it. It is his scary voice. And it means John is so angry that I could see him doing something to get arrested. So I get him back in the car and we go home. But by this point, my interior and both of my kids smell like Bud Light. And I have to go to work as a healtcare provider in that car. Great. I figure it is a good idea to call the police so I have documentation. The last thing I want is for someone to pull me over and think I had been drinking. Or bathing my children in beer. And as soon as the cruiser door opens, the cop says "Wow, I can already smell it!" That is how bad it was. He told me there was a road block around the corner because of the holiday weekend and gave me his business card to show the officer who stops me so they know the boozey smell wasn't coming from me. Lovely. With that, I head into work.



The Epic Disaster

Here I am at work. I have been in the car for 5 hours that day. I have had an altercation with morons, the police at my house, my baby to the ER, and no sleep.



How could I forget that this night was to be my first run-in with the new $80M software program the hospital has purchased? And to make matters worse, I was supposed to be off, but came in to help out my fellow man. So this new system is to encompass all I do at the hospital: pharmacy records, charting, orders, medical records, lab results, x-ray images and reports, and even communication with other members of the healthcare team.It's called Epic. And it is a effing disaster. A complete clusterf###. Seriously. And of course I get the crappiest assignment in the hospital because they figure I am only there for 8 instead of 12 hours. It also happens to be Pediatric Respiratory Night in the hospital. Left and right, children were being admitted from the ER. The problem with this is that kids are seen and assessed every 2 hours. When you have 80 patients, you cannot finish a complete round by then. Plus the e-disaster with the new software. Gah! I should have stayed home! I counted down until my shift was over, only to encounter a catastrophe of another variety upon my exit from the hospital...



The Why-the-Bleep-Does-My-Car-Sound-Like-a-Weedeater Moment

Yep, you read that correctly. It really did. Someone in a beat-up Nova was actually gawking at my car because of the way it sounded. The clencher? My car is a 2009 model. What the %$&^*?????? Seriously? Fo' rizzle! Granted it is slightly over the 36K miles that is the bumper-to-bumper warranty, because for the first few months I owned it, I was commuting to work from 90 minutes away. But still. It's seriously less than 2 years old. There is no reason it should sound like that! But of course with it being a holiday weekend, I have to wait for a couple of days for a Dodge dealer to open in order to have the problem diagnosed.

When we finally get the car looked at by someone qualified for such a thing, we discover that the alternator has a bearing in it that is going out, causing it to jump around inside my car's guts. And they tell me that it could go out in the next 5 minutes or it could last like that for a year. Noone knows. Of course I am most decidedly not okay with this information, and end up thunking down over $500 for the repair. I am pretty disgruntled that I have to do so with my newish car, though. So once I prepay for the expensive part, I call the customer line for Dodge and complain. They take down some info and tell me they will get back with me. The next day, a nice man named Chad calls my house and tells me that Dodge is going to refund all of my money for the repair so long as I can mail them copies of my receipts. Done. I guess the squeakiest wheel really does get the oil.

So there you have it: the reason I haven't blogged. Now you're up to speed.

The Benefits of My Workplace

I am usually the queen of organization. And I give scouts a run for their money when it comes to preparedness. But last night when I got to work, I realized I did not bring my A game. Really. I usually load up my bag with the various crap I take. When you work 12 hours, 3/4 of your day is spent working. So....I have to remember to take 2 doses each of my fenugreek, blessed thistle and alfalfa, my prenatal vitamin, my DHA supplement, and my birth control pill. I take them all at dinner, then take a second dose of the herbs later. I remembered those. But which s the most important on that list? (Hint: Pregnancy from HELL!) Yep! I forgot my BCP. So I called John. His response? "Do you really want me to schlep out to bring it to you????" Nope. I don't. That's fine Stay home. But he is now officially cut off.

But that isn't all I forgot. I went to pump the first time at 9 PM. Usually, I pumpinto small-ish containers, then dump into a milk storage bag until it is full, then start over with a new bag, etc. Well, these small containers hold about 5 ounces, total. Not gonna work for 12 hours. But I forgot that I used the last storage bag in my pumping bag last time I worked. My cup runneth over. Literally. What to do, what to do? Well, duh Andrea! I work in a hospital! There has to be sterile containers. So I pilfered through the clean supply room in the MICU and came up with this:

Yep, that really is a urine specimen cup. Hey, they're sterile and individually wrapped! Desperate times call for desperate measures. And working in a hospital has its advantages at times! Of course John about died when I brought these home in the morning. Oh well.