He was on a ventilator, and was visibly struggling to try to breathe. (even over a week later, this is hard to watch without getting upset)
Aidan had catheter IV lines where his umbilical cord was. They used these to draw blood from him and to administer medicine. He had all sorts of sensor leads stuck to him. One for his heart rate, one for his breathing rate, one for his pulse, one for his body temperature, and one for his blood oxygen level.
The Neonatologist described him as "vigorous", which was nice to hear. I saw one of the nurses writing down Aidan's 10-minute Apgar score. I later learned that his 1-minute score was 4, his 5-minute score was 5, and his 10 minute score was 7. I felt much better seeing that Aidan was breathing, but knew he had a long, hard road ahead of him in the NICU.
Denyse spent about 2 hours in the recovery room. On her way from the Recovery to a new postpartum room, they wheeled her bed into the NICU so she could see Aidan for the first time. They said that they normally don't like to wheel beds into the NICU, but they were making an exception. Hearing this really frightened me, and made me think that they didn't think that Aidan was going to live long.
I had taken pictures of Aidan and showed them to Denyse in recovery, but it's really hard to have perspective on how small he really is. When Denyse saw Aidan, her first words were, "Oh my God, he's so small", and she started to cry. It was very warm around Aidan from the heating lamp above him, and this was making Denyse feel nauseous. So she could only stay about 5 minutes and then she needed to be taken out of the NICU and moved down the hall to her new postpartum room.
Aidan spent his first full day with a breathing tube on a high frequency ventilator. This machine gently puffs air into his lungs several times a second. Since Aidan was trying really hard to breathe, he was actually working against the ventilator, and they decided to give him some morphine to settle him down.
Aidan didn't need to breathe on this ventilator, since it was doing all the breathing for him, making his tummy flicker up and down very quickly (12 times per second).
Aidan was very bruised from the delivery. His hands, legs, and head were very black & blue.
Premature babies almost always have a bilirubin problem (jaundice), and by the afternoon, Aidan was put under a blue light. He also got to wear a cool-looking white warrior helmet to protect his eyes.
They gave Aidan 2 doses of surfactant, a soapy white liquid that will help him develop lung tissue:
Aidan finished his first day with stable vital signs, and was doing better. We felt much better.
Aidan ends the day stable on the high-frequency ventilator:
More pictures from Aidan's first day...
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