The Waiting Game

It looks like Laney is going to be teaching Angie and me the new meaning of patience. Not that she is trying our patience, far from it. She has been doing very well the past week. Getting her weight up and over her birth weight was a wonderful milestone. But we are learning that we will probably have many, many more small, positive milestones to go before we take her home. If you had asked us before this started whether we knew the path would lead this way, we would have said yes, we know it will be a long hard row to hoe. But once you are in it, hoeing that row, it sometimes feels like you're never going to get to the end of that row. It looks more and more like we're going to get there, but we keep trying to steel ourselves to the fact that it is going to take a while. You'd think after 8 weeks of bedrest that we would have learned some patience, but apparently not.

We have much to be thankful for, though. One is that two different nurses have asked to be Laney's primary nurse. When those two are on a shift, they now are almost always assigned to Laney. I had no idea how much better that would make us feel when we go home at night, or when we can't be there every minute of each day, knowing she is in the hands of a nurse we know, like, and trust. Nearly all the nurses have been great, and getting a little variety sometimes is probably helpful, considering the notion that the more eyes checking on her the better, and considering the crucial role that nurses are playing in Laney's day-to-day progress. But having some consistency does wonders for our piece of mind. Little nuances like the fact that the canula CPAP makes her nose bleed and plug up, and the fact that many of her decelerations in blood oxygen concentration are caused by plugged nasal passages, those are things the nurses remember when they have her over and over again.

These are just two small examples from many to choose from. Bottom line, the consistent nurses care for Laney better because they know what she is like and they see progress or setbacks and can infer why they are occurring. The nurses that only have her once can't put the pieces together quite as well, and it is much harder to go home at night when you don't know the nurse. Thankfully, for yesterday and the next two days, she has the same two nurses on back-to-back 12 hour shifts, so Angie and I are on Cloud 9 with respect to our comfort level with Laney's nurses right now. I know, part of this is probably us just being protective parents, but much of it is real, and makes a world of difference.

One thing this ordeal has shown us is how supportive our friends and family are. We are getting help from every possible direction and we know most of you would like to do even more if you could or if there was more that needed to be done, which thankfully, right now, there is not. We have been overwhelmed on a daily basis with your generosity and compassion and cannot thank you all enough. Despite what we have been through and what is yet to come, we feel so blessed and are so grateful to all of you. Your generosity appears to know no bounds.
The Meyers