Grendel’s Kitchen

Anna-Li wakes at 9pm for water, painkiller, and toothbrushing with Dora.

UPDATE: It was a bit of a rough night. Shortly after her first morphine dose by mouth following a seemingly successful drink of two cups of apple juice, Li-Li was very sick to her stomach and doused the two of us with most of her medicine. So I unsuccessfully fussed with the charge nurse to get approval for more drugs while poor Li-Li screamed and I mopped us up — not sure if it was the shock of vomiting or the pain that was upsetting her so. I struggled with finding a way to make my argument compelling: variations on “please give her another dose of morphine or I’ll start screaming too,” didn’t work. And I figured that violence or racing out to buy drugs on the street wasn’t the answer.Some time later, Li-Li fell into a deep sleep, despite the monitor that went off every 2 hours to notify us that we needed an IV change. Too deep a sleep, though, because the floor was wakened by Li-Li’s apnea alarm, blasting from our bed to the nurse’s station down the hall to let someone know that she’d stopped breathing for more than a minute. I had the side of her crib down in a second, yanked her off the bed and gave her a swift, firm body slam of sorts — she awoke and breathed deeply, and cried, but the alarm subsided. Shortly after I reattached the wires that I’d pulled off, the nurse stopped by and said “she stopped breathing, hmmm? I saw the alarm go off.” I was still breathing hard myself, but shakily told her what I’d done. She nodded and said, “That’s right, it’s what we’d have done — just wake them up. I saw the monitor come back up and figured you had it.”But, she stopped breathing! “It happens. She’s fine. We’ll just watch her.” I made the nurse stay with me and watch her in person for the next half hour, during which the monitor indicated several moments where her breathing stopped, but not long enough to set off any alarms. The nurse left, I sat watching baby and monitor (and double-checking that little person’s chest movement) from 2am to 7am. I don’t think I blinked very much at all.And yet, despite all that, she’s fine, she checked out beautifully in the morning and conducted her own rounds up and down the floor, following the doctors with her very special stethoscope that grandmama gave her!