Davis—who wasn’t yet named—rolled out in an incubator with three members of the NICU staff. I got a quick update from Dr. Treen, the physician that had helped deliver Davis and had worked on him in the OR. Inside the incubator, Davis was wrapped up in multiple blankets—which he had kicked loose around his feet by the time we got him in to the NICU—and had a cap covering his head. He had been tubed and put on a portable ventilator in the OR, where they had also given him a shot of surfactant right in the tube. Dr. Treen stated he responded very well to it.
Once in the NICU, they transferred Davis from the portable incubator to a bed with a warmer above it. One of the hardest things for newborns is keeping their temperature up, and this goes for full-termers as well as preemies. Dr. Treen and her team had given Davis a preliminary cleaning in the OR, and told me they would be giving him a more thorough one shortly. She performed a series of checks on him, proudly informed me he had all of his parts, in the correct number, and he responded well to the eye, ear, and nose tests.
He was quite the stubborn one when it came to checking his eyes. When Dr. Treen tried to open his left eye to shine the light in, he clamped it down hard. One of the nurses had to get a pair of Q-tips to use to pry it open, and he fought her the whole way. Dr. Treen told the nurse to relax, and she snapped off the light, and Davis immediately opened his eye. You guessed it: he promptly slammed it shut when Dr. Treen turned on her little light again!
It’s bad enough for Mom and Dad when their son gets the ol’ Turner hard-headedness; add in the Lanning stubbornness, and you know what a joy he’s going to be when he hits those teenage years. ;-)
All in all, Dr. Treen said he was doing just fine, all things considered. She had me leave before they began putting the various tubes and catheters in through his belly button. In her words, he was not going to be very happy with them, and I probably wouldn’t want to see it. Besides, by that time, Kelly should have been in recovery, and she was…
Posted by retrophisch at August 14, 2003 02:25 PM