Day Thirteen

You may be wondering why I keep using the delivery category of this blog. In a typical delivery, parents get to leave the hospital with their baby, which effectively ends the delivery stage. That hasn’t happened as of this post but it’s more likely to happen soon, which will open a new world for everyone.

Lara and I visited Jaxon today at his home-away-fr0m-home. As mentioned in the last post, he was moved from the NICU location to the step-down unit. The Neonatal Intensive Care Unit holds up to 39 at risk newborn and provides exigent care. The Step-Down Unit provides less intensive care and in most cases more rest. Basically, this means that Jax is better, but not quiet ready to be released to us.

The department chair, Zacharia Cherian, MD, met with us last week to explain how the NICU works and the level of care Jax would receive. As department chair, you would expect him to have limited knowledge of us or Jax. He is a tall, slender man with focused eyes. However, when he spoke with us, we know that he read our file. He knew who we were and Jax’s situation. While he was right about many things, his initial assessment was that Jax could stay as long as seven weeks in hospital care. I hope that Jax will continue to prove people wrong.

Lara visited Jax first. She’s had some trouble with lactation and wanted to talk with someone at the hospital. She also wanted to see if she could actually breast feed Jax for the first time. As I waited to see Jax, Dr. Cherian stopped by to talk with Lara and I separately. He said that other than his issues with eating, that he looks pretty good.

I had a few moments with him. The nurse allowed me to change is diaper, which is a challenge given all of his monitoring. He made a tremendous poo. I was also able to feed and burp him and naturally, he drank the entire bottle, burped and pooped. It’s a safe bet that I’ll be doing most of the feeding.

That’s it for now, more later.