Day 5: Homeward Bound

Today was a bittersweet day in the NICU. One of the kids who has been there for over four months was finally discharged! While I'm sure his parents were thrilled, they kept repeatedly saying, "We will really miss seeing you guys every day." I can only imagine the bonds parents build with the nurses, doctors, and staff, especially when seeing them every day for 120-some days straight. Deb was in charge of this boy, so I got to see the complicated process of discharging a patient who still needs lots of medication, oxygen, and 24-hour assistance at home.

Deb had two of the same babies today, and because they are big and almost ready to go home, I was able to do a lot of their care. I changed quite a few diapers, took several temperatures, changed a couple oxygenation cuffs on their feet, and of course fed and snuggled them even more. That's the best part!

Because St. V's is located in down town Toledo, quite a few of the babies who are admitted to the NICU are going through drug withdrawl. I have helped care for several of these babies. The nurses use a system called Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome (NAS) scoring to determine the severity of drug withdrawl and how bad the baby's symptoms are. Deb gave me the sheet that they use to score babies, which assigns a certain number of points to each symptom the baby exhibits. Any score above an eight is considered too severe for the baby to be discharged, and ideally the scores should consistently be zero to three. There are a lot of symptoms of drug withdrawl, but a few are high-pitched crying, tremors, muscle tightness, poor feeding, and watery stools. I have seen all of these symptoms among several of the drug withdrawl babies in the NICU.

The NAS scoring chart