Friday, 23 Aug 2002
Slept in a bit, getting up around 8:30 or 9:00. Looked at the email back-log, read some of it, blew off most of it. After grabbing a quick work-out, dealt a little bit more. Wasn't in a huge hurry to get to the hospital, because the NICU is closed to visitors from 9:45 to 11:00 (due to daily rounds and patient confidentiality reasons). Got to the hospital, finally, about 11:30, after getting sucked into playing with pictures a bit too much.
Got the bad news that Ro's white blood cell count had actually gone up, to 55K. She's apparently got some significant "left shift" as well (which means a large number of immature white blood cells; basically, her bone marrow is throwing the kitchen sink at whatever critters are present). That wasn't too encouraging, and it looks like she might be in the hospital for a week (or more) at this point.
About 2 pm, I left to grab some lunch and a nap. I headed back over to the hospital about 7 pm (NICU is closed again from 6:45 to 7:15, for shift change and the same confidentiality resanos), met up with TheWife and headed back down. Ro had apparently had a pretty good afternoon feeding, and we wanted a good dinner too.
She seemed to nurse okay, although she was also playing with the nipple a lot rather than sucking hard. The tricky part was getting her back to sleep once she was done eating: she didn't want to go. We kept getting her close, but then she'd have this little all-over/jerk muscle spasm thing, which would wake her back up. We finally ended up putting her back in the basinette and rocking her to sleep, and we finally left the NICU at about 10 pm.
I walked TheWife back up to her room, so that she could get a bit of rest before the next feeding, and then I headed home. Once I got there, I couldn't really sleep, so I ended up watching some television, and then reading in bed. I think I finally closed my eyes around 3 am, but I tossed fitfully for most of the night.
Day two: things could be better, but they're not horrible.
Exercise: 24 minutes at L7 'hill' for 8.6 miles