RSS feedWe’d planned the weekend. Even though it is only Sunday morning, dear reader you should have already guessed the rest of the story.
Saturday (yesterday) morning we did a little breast feed, and Louise’s brother, sister in law, nephew and niece all came to see Molly. Special Care has a bunch of rules that we need to follow, such as: not allowing more than three people at a time to visit, including parents; not looking at any other babies in the ward; no long sleeves; scrubbing hands and arms up to the elbow; and no children allowed unless they’re actually siblings of the baby. So unfortunately Louise’s niece couldn’t see Molly, but that’s OK, she’ll have a special treat once Molly is home, to help make amends.
So with Louise bottle feeding Molly, I brought them all in one at a time. Most people are used to dropping a baby, having it in the mother’s hospital room for a few days and then heading home, so the RPA nursery can be a bit of a shock to parent who’ve done it the easy way. It’s effectively an emergency ward for babies, which makes sense considering Molly is now roughly 36 and a half weeks old, and in theory still having about 3 weeks before she’s supposed to be born. Even though she’s now coming up to her 3rd week birthday.
We had a sleep in the afternoon and came back to do a quick breast feed in the evening. She’s still not doing full feeds, she needs a 40ml bottle top up after the breast feed, and she’s still having only two of those a day, with the other five feeds still going in via the IG (feeding tube).
So around 7pm we did a breast feed and a bottle top up, and Louise went off to express some milk while I held Molly. We sang a few songs (“Moby Dick” by Led Zeppelin was a favourite, so maybe she’ll be a drummer), and played hi-5 a lot, until Louise came back 30 minutes later. As I stood up, I noticed an extra yellow patch on my Scared Scriptless tshirt, which for a second looked just part of the tshirt, until I noticed it was… poo.. lots of it. Then we noticed the poo all up her legs and arms, now all over the cot, and even inside her identification bands.
Molly is notorious for peeing during nappy changes, and a few days ago I got to eight nappy changes in a row where this was the case. But this was the first time she’d pooed so much that it all came out the sides.
In the ward there’s four disposal bags. One each for baby clothes, towels and linen, soiled (to be destroyed) waste (pooey things), and normal waste. I was cleaning my tshirt off, because I had nothing else to wear, not knowing whether I should be cleaning it over their sink or not, and I ended up with completely soaked clothes, but still a slight poo stain. Meanwhile, we’d planned to have a lovely Sunday having a bath day, so we decided with the nurses to move that forward, and do an emergency poo bath.
After some quizzing from the nurses, we realised that Molly had probably just experienced her first cajun spicy chicken, which Louise had eaten the night before. Start them early I reckon. Louise has been trying all sorts of things she hasn’t been allowed to eat for the last nine months, so who knows what delights Molly will experience over the next few weeks. Louise had just had curry chicken for lunch, so the next few days should be interesting.
Meanwhile at the bath, she was completely covered in poo, from arm to toe, which was a wonderful experience. But as the nurses keep saying, a few weeks in Special Care can be a blessing in disguise, because while most parents are left to fend or themselves from the get go, Louise and I will have several weeks of learning the ropes with the experts. We’re already completely comfortable with all her regular maintenance and cares, and know a whole bunch of tricks and techniques, and we haven’t even gotten her home yet.
So we got her all cleaned up and tucked in and headed home to sleep. I of course still had my own cleaning to do once I’d gotten home, after producing our very first piece of soiled clothing.
They said we can now take her outside for an hour in a hospital pram, to either the hospital cafe, or the McCafe up the road, so that’s a our focus for today, a family pram expedition, most likely just to the hospital cafe for lunch. Whether Mum decides to have another curry is another story altogether.