No Place Like Home

For the longest time, I felt like something was missing. I didn't feel complete. Now, like magic, I feel whole. Jayden has been home for almost 3 weeks. At the lowest points of his NICU stay, I didn't believe he would ever come home. The weekend before he was released, Jay and I hit a low point. We were getting so frustrated with his lack of progress, but even more so with the doctors telling us there wasn't anything they could do. So I took matters into my own hands. I made them put him on 100% formula. Until then he was getting breast milk fortified to 24 calories. I am taking Celexa which is an antidepressant. Some research has shown that it can cause drowsiness in infants. I kept bringing this up to the doctors and they told me it wasn't affecting him. I know preemies are sleepy babies, but we were getting to him being full term and he was still not waking up for most feedings and not finishing the feedings he was being given by bottle. He was also having a lot of gas and reflux issues. If he was at home, I would have considered doing diet eliminations in order to determine if what I was eating was causing the digestion issues, but we were coming up on 6 weeks in the NICU and we wanted our baby home. That combined with the reports of Celexa, I told them to stop the breast milk. Within 36 hours I had a completely different baby. He was finishing more than 50 % of his feedings by bottle (they were only giving him the bottle ever other feeding). It all depended on which nurse was taking care of him as to how much they pushed him to finish a feeding. On Monday September 17th, the Neonatal Nurse Practitioner decided to offer him the bottle at every feeding (something I had been asking for a while). The thought was that even though he appeared to be sleepy, he would take the bottle if the nurse offered it (another thing I had been telling them). They also upped his calories to 24 (they had dropped it to 22 since he was gaining weight so well). This allowed him to have a range of volume he could take for it to be considered a full feeding. With those changes, he took everything by bottle and on Tuesday afternoon his feeding tube was removed. He was also taken for his circumcision (a tell tale sign they would be releasing him soon).  I went that night for his 8 pm feeding and the NICU was packed with babies. The week before Jayden had been the only baby there for a few days. I joked with the nurse that we would gladly give up our bed since they seemed to have a full house. Usually when I would make comments like that, the nurses would give me the standard "he will go home when he is ready". This time she said that it could probably be arranged. I asked if he could go home tomorrow, she said she would talk to them during shift change in the morning. Let's just say I did not really sleep Tuesday night. When I arrived on Wednesday morning (I specifically arrived before rounds) I asked again if he could go home. The nurse told me she would bring it up and push for it at rounds. The night before Jayden had deemed himself ready to be without oxygen by pulling the entire canula, stickers and all, off of his face and maintaining his sats while feeding (the only reason he needed oxygen). The doctor agreed that he could go home, and on Wednesday, September 19th, our beautiful baby boy came home. I am no longer missing a piece of myself.