Communication

James is doing fine. He didn't have any fever last night or today, and is still taking his bottles well. Matthew is also doing well, despite the indignity of having his father dress him in the wrong team colors for the LSU/UF game last night.

Yesterday was a little frustrating in terms of communication with the NICU. The babies are on a every three hours care schedule, and James's schedule is an hour off from the regular schedule (e.g., the usual care times are at 8, 11, etc., and he's on 9, 12, etc.). So we tried not to call at the regular care times, because presumably the nurse would be busy taking care of her other baby, and we tried not to call at his care times, but even so, we got someone other than his nurse answering the phone a couple of times. In fact, I don't think we ever actually got to talk to his night nurse. Fortunately, the other nurses were at least able to tell us that he was doing okay and did not have a fever.

The worst was when we called for our late-night update and were on hold for almost a half-hour. (I'm not exaggerating; our phone has a timer on it. Normally we wouldn't have been that patient, but Mike was working on his computer and I was in the other room with Matthew.) We hung up and called back, and were on hold for another five minutes, at which point I decided there must be a problem with the phones, and we called back and asked to just talk to someone in Pod C. The person who answered informed us that James's nurse was on break. That's fine, but it's unacceptable (and in fairness, extremely unusual) to leave a parent on hold for that long. There are times when that kind of delay would have made me hysterical, because the longer we have to wait on hold, the more I start to worry that no one is answering because something bad has happened. This time, I figured that since he'd been fine all day and all of last night, he was probably still fine, but even so -- the lead story on the daily news is about kids dying of the flu, and my former preemie is in the hospital with the flu, and so somebody needs to pick up the phone when we call.

So then when I went to sleep I had nightmares about all of that, from which Matthew thoughtfully rescued me by waking up hungry a mere two hours after I had gone to bed.

Fortunately, today is off to a better start. James's nurse is someone who has had him before, and she mentioned that she held him for a while after feeding him. Yay! (I was a little worried that someone who had never had him might feel like they got the short end of the stick by being assigned to him -- "great, I get the kid with the flu and the ostomy bag?")

I think we're going to stay away from the hospital again today to be on the safe side. But this may be the first time I've ever gone more than a day without seeing my James, so it makes me sad. We'll just have to give him extra cuddles when he comes home!