Five Pounds of Awesome

She finally hit the five pound mark, and in a big way! After dancing around the issue for more than a week, she finally crossed the line tonight, weighing in at 2,347 grams. 5lbs 3 oz. Five whole pounds of awesomeness. Five whole pounds of awesome baby with no debilitating eye disease (yay!), but with two sick parents (boo!).

Don’s been sick for a few days now, but I deemed myself well enough for the NICU this morning and got in to the hospital around 10am. Morning rounds were more of the same—keep her swaddled, keep her oxygenated, and let her grow. The doctors had already put the drops in her eyes for the exam this morning, so she was puffy and either couldn’t open her eyes, or didn’t want to.

Nyana gets her eyes checked at eight weeks old. She passes her exam.

When the optician came in around 11 o’clock, a few other moms started looking about the room, asking each other whose baby is she here for? I’m sure in retrospect, she wasn’t nearly as scary as I’m remembering her now. But she was dressed casually in street clothes in a room full of scrubs, and she was wearing this concoction on her head I can only imagine was a magnifier. She carried a plastic tub of what I construed to be long, sharp pokers and vials of poison. Don has made me sit through enough slasher flicks to know that this woman was up to no good.

I watched the exam for a few minutes, before deciding that Baby Nicolas across from us hadn’t been admired in a while… well, ever. Baby Nicolas is the son of the Smug Parents, who, as it turns out, aren’t so smug at all. I chatted with his mom for the duration of Nyana’s exam, then went back to comfort our Chub as soon as the plainclothes doctor was done. Amazingly, through the entire procedure, Nyana remained in the low end of her oxygen needs and continued her high scores on her saturation levels.

Lucky for me, the eye exam is one of the few with immediate results. Based on today’s testing, Nyana’s eyes are fine and will develop normally. We’ll do another exam in two weeks’ time to be certain, but it looks like we dodged the ROP bullet. I didn’t realize how stressed I’ve been about the ventilator damaging her eyesight until the doctor told me she couldn’t see any sign of damage. Despite today’s monsoon rains, there was a skip in my step as I left the hospital.

I lunched with Don downtown, went to a dentist appointment, and made chicken salad sandwiches for dinner. Somewhere in that time, I went from feeling perfectly fine to feeling like I was swallowing sandpaper. I went to visit Nyana tonight and declined a cuddle because I was afraid of getting too close. And now I’m just full-on sick. Don tells me he’s feeling much better and should be well enough tomorrow night. Fantastic. Tag, you’re it.