We've had a concerning week with Aiden this week. During the nights while he was sleeping, his heart rate would drop down so low that it would make his monitor alarms go off. This started happening a few times a night and then got progressively worse. Usually, the rate would only stay low for a few minutes, and then pop back up to where it should be. As the week went on, this started happening more and more often. One time, the rate stayed low for about thirty minutes. I was out of town and it scared Amaraa. She called the NICU and asked them what she should do. They suggested she turn up the oxygen flow rate a little bit and that would cause the heart rate to stay up. She tried that and the problem seemed to get a little better. They told her that she should take Aiden to the Emergency Room if this continued to happen. He seemed more fussy than usual, wasn't eating very well, and seemed uncomfortable. I thought the heart rate issue could be a problem with the monitor, but we weren't sure. We felt like we needed to have him checked out. When I came home from Price on Saturday, we hopped in the car and took him up to the ER at Primary Children's. We arrived at the hospital at around 4:00 PM. They checked him over and ran some tests. They gave him an Albuterol breathing treatment and he calmed down. They monitored him for a while and told us they would like to admit him and watch him overnight. There wasn't a bed available, so we ended up sitting in the ER until about 9:45 PM. On the hospital monitors, his heart rate and oxygen saturation levels looked great. When they found a room for us, we hooked him back up to our monitor for the trip upstairs. About a minute after I hooked him up, the heart rate dropped down low and the alarm started sounding. We hadn't moved him yet. He was calm. He didn't seem to be distressed. His oxygen saturation levels were still fine. I couldn't believe that it could be an accurate reading when he had been holding steady on the hospital monitors for the last five hours. We went upstairs the the Children's Surgical Unit and were admitted into a room.
The room had a crib, a chair that folded out into a short bed, and a rocking chair. Amaraa and I both decided to stay with Aiden overnight. Unfortunately, the fold-out chair would only accommodate one person. I tried my best to find a comfortable position on the rocking chair, but finally gave up. I spread out a blanket on the floor and slept there. What a miserable night! I only slept about three hours and woke up with a migraine. When the morning finally rolled around, the nurses and doctors came in to do their rounds. They had monitored Aiden all night and said he didn't have any episodes of bradychardia (the heart rate drops). They said he looked really good on the monitors all night. One of the nurses said they were going to move us to a different room sometime today. They kept talking like we were going to be staying another night. Amaraa and I decided to run home to Lehi to grab some necessities in preparation for another night. When we got home, I took a quick shower, we grabbed what we needed, and headed back toward the hospital. When we got back, we saw the nurse still holding Aiden in his room. She said he wouldn't let her put him down except for about fifteen minutes when he fell asleep. She also said that the doctors had decided they were going to discharge Aiden. We were really happy.
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| Ready to get out of the hospital...again. |
The doctor came in about a half hour later and told us that Aiden looked great. She said he had been solid as a rock overnight and hadn't shown any signs of bradychardia. They had run virus panels and other tests that all came back negative. They had done a blood gas test and a chest x-ray, and both of those came back right in line with the ones that had been done before he was discharged from the NICU. He had two echo cardiograms while he was in the NICU and those both showed that there were no structural problems with his heart. The doctor was positive that the problem was the monitor and not a problem with Aiden. She recommended that we discontinue use of the monitor entirely. I told her I wasn't comfortable doing that yet, but that we would disregard the heart rate monitor part of it. I want to continue monitoring his oxygen saturation levels because the monitor will alert us if the cannula comes out of his nose, if an oxygen tank runs out of oxygen, etc. She said it is possible to set the monitor to only alarm on the oxygen saturation side, and not on the heart rate side.
As soon as we finished talking to the doctor, we received Aiden's discharge papers and we went downstairs to the car. We were really happy that we didn't have to stay any longer. I wasn't looking forward to another night on that hard floor. Of course, we were mostly excited to find out that there was nothing wrong with our little guy. It was reassuring to find out that he was doing well after being home for a couple of weeks.
In my last post, I mentioned the Torgerson family reunion that we had last weekend. While I was there, I found out that my cousin, Alynn, is somewhat of a celebrity. She is a food blogger and has been on Studio 5 on KSL. I checked out her blog and everything on it looks really yummy. Her blog is called "Meals 4 Moms" and you can find it by clicking
here. The whole idea of the blog is to "help moms spend less time in the kitchen and more time with the ones they love." Check it out. Bookmark it. Visit it often. It's definitely worth your while.
