Millie's Milestones

MILLIE is doing so well she has been promoted to the Winnie the Pooh room.

This is the room for medium dependency babies, rather than the Peter Rabbit room which is for high dependency babies.

All the tubes into her body have now been removed, except the feeding tube through one of her nostrils and into her stomach.

Millie is now on a 100% diet of mummy's milk, fed at a rate of 18ml every two hours.

Over the last 24 hours, she has put on 36 grammes and is now about 40 grammes less than her birth weight.

This is very good progress.

But mummy and daddy have found it hard to adjust to the different sounds that the monitoring machines make in this new room.

Sensors seem more sensitive and the noises they emit much louder.

This is probably a good job because Millie is doing everything herself, rather than having any help from drips or machines, other than the incubator keeping her warm.

There are two basic monitors.

The first is heart beat, measured in beats per minute (bpm).

This usually shows anything from 140 to 190 bpm - much faster than an adult heart rate but normal for a baby.

The second is the oxygen saturation level in her blood. This is referred to as her 'sats' and is measured as a percentage.

If the sats fall below 90%, it triggers the alarm, which emits a loud deep beeping.

Tonight, Millie set it off about 20 times within an hour.

It turned out that the sensor wasn't connected properly to her foot. Every time she stretched, the alarm went off.

So nothing to worry about, but still rather scary!

posted by Johann @ 11:51 PM