The LAMB Family

It has now been a week since our precious twins were born. They days are all running together now. We wake up, hang out in the room with Kynan and Kaci until the doctors and nurses do their rounds. I don’t know how it is in other hospitals, but here, the parents are included in the rounds and our opinions and wishes are asked for as well as any observations we’ve made or questions we want answered. I kind of like it. It helps me not feel as useless.

Today during rounds, the new attending (they switch off every week, and this attending is new to the hospital as well—she came from Johns Hopkins) actually questioned the resident, nurses, and med student—challenging them to think and explain their answers or ideas. It was just like on tv. Well—this style is apparently new to the resident and med student, because they didn’t seem to appreciate the criticism and challenge very much. It was funny, but educational for me as well. I was much better able to understand what they were talking about, and when a particularly med-language chat was had, the attending looked over at us and explained in Melissa language what was being said. I did like that.

After rounds, we take our showers (sometimes we do this before rounds), then we head into a day of watching, touching, talking to, and sometimes holding our newborn Kynan. At some point we eat lunch and dinner and some times we venture outside the hospital. I don’t like leaving the hospital though. I feel as though something bad is going to happen when I leave. Probably because the first time I left, Kaci had to be re-intubated and the second time I left, I walked back in to view her getting a PIC-line put in. Traumatic experiences for me both times. I told Heath that he will never convince me that Kaci needed the oxygen tube back in for any other reason that she knew I had left and she gave up the will to breath on her own. Silly, I know…but I am certain that is what happened.

Today I got to feed Kynan out of a bottle! He only actually got about 2 ccs of fluid in his tummy from this, but it is a start. I enjoyed the snuggling and the feeling that I was feeding him. While I took a nap this afternoon, Heath spent 45 minutes snuggling Kynan in the monkey quilt that I made a few weeks ago. I’m happy he was able to hold him and love on him that long.

Kaci had some excess fluid in her lungs today, so they gave her something called Lasix—a diuretic. Within a very short time, she had peed out a ton of fluid. We are hoping that the fluid was just because she has been getting too much from her feeds and IVs combined. They have cut back her IV fluids for the time being. They will do another chest x-ray tomorrow morning to look at her lungs again. If there is still fluid, they may need to check for infection or another cause. We hope it was just too much fluid.

I promise the pictures of Kaci will increase once she starts waking up and we can hold her. Hopefully soon! We will be here in the NICU for at least another week.

Daddy holding his baby.