The doctors came around at 7am when we are all asleep (Debbie and Dom in the cot, Matt on a mattress). When we woke up we found out that the chest tubes have to stay in but the catheter can come out. We have to hold Dominic down for another heel prick, which is again horrible. The catheter comes out at about 9am, Dom is much more comfortable once it’s out. He’s able to sleep on his tummy, his preferred position! The day settles into a routine of Dom breastfeeding and sleeping. Sleeping – not passing out! Hooray! At one point his IV springs a leak and starts spurting blood out of the back of his hand. It makes a disturbing mess on the sheets and takes quite a while to get sorted out (the spurting blood is stopped reasonably promptly after we frantically buzz the nurse, but getting the IV sorted and the machine to stop complaining about occlusions downstream takes the better part of 20 grumpy minutes). Dom’s morphine is turned down to 3ml/h in the morning, then 2ml/h at night. Dom is properly awake in the afternoon and evening for an hour or so, able to sit up and look around, watch TV, read books and stuff. It’s a relief to see him properly conscious – though his desire to crawl off the bed or roll over a lot sees him pretty tangled up in wires on more than one occasion!
Night 3
We are looking forward to quite a settled night, with lots of feeding and sleeping. Unfortunately a new person is moved into the room from 5pm. We’d had the room to ourselves since Dom’s operation, which was quite a luxury, but it came to an abrupt end when three women and a baby shuffled in and started talking loudly. It was 2 CYFs workers and a young mother, who struck us as being a little… trashy? She’d been accused of hitting her 5 week old baby and been brought in by CYFs for a bunch of tests on her son. The x-ray and physical exam had shown no signs of anything untoward, and she was waiting for a CT scan before she could go home. She was loudly protesting her innocence, speculating about which of the people she knew was likely to have made the complaint, burping and farting and smelling of eggs. Or maybe that was her sandwiches? Her baby cried a lot, unsurprisingly, though he settled when she left him in the care of a CYFs worker so she could go out for a smoke. Thankfully she refused to stay in overnight so was gone by 10pm, after a late-night trip to the CT scanner. We were all reasonably settled after that, and we all got some sleep. Dom was sleeping 1 to 1.5 hours between feeds, so Debbie was able to climb out of the cot and stretch out properly for most of the night. There were still lots of hassles with IV lines twisting and occlusions and air in tubes to keep us on our toes, but it was a very peaceful night compared to what had gone before.
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