PANIC.... and relax

So Mum and Dad waited until lunchtime before coming to see me today. And this is what they saw:

Breathing for myself

My lovely nurses had decided to give me some time breathing for myself. And everyone got to see my hair and ears. Mum and Dad were very excited and Dad decided to tuck me into his shirt:

Snuggled - the calm before the storm

But it's quite hard for me to do all my own breathing and I'd been off my support for over 2 hours. So I was struggling to keep my oxygen levels up. Dad tried and my nurses tried but it wasn't working and I dropped my sats (oxygen saturation percentage) to 50%.

So they agreed to put me back onto CPAP (the pressure support to help my breathing). This turned out to be trickier than expected. My sats dropped to 28% and my pulse rate to 40 (my normal is 170 beats per minute. They resuscitate at 70). I turned deep blue. Apparently this is not good.

Fiona, my nurse for today, managed to get me back on CPAP, rub me enough to get my heart beating faster, force me to breath enough, keep my parents calm and then rest me against Dad again - all in about 5 minutes. Everyone seemed very impressed. People said something about needing a change of underwear, but that's OK, I get mine changed every 4 hours.

Then I settled on Dad, so he could feed me and cuddle me.

Multi-tasking Dad

He tried reading his magazine but I managed to stop him by dropping my heart rate so he had to squeeze me or by grabbing his chest hair - that kept him awake!

Grab then pull!

After two whole hours on Daddy, I was swapped over and spent over an hour having a cuddle from Mum:

Very proud Mum.

I definitely prefer 'skin to skin' without the hairs - they taste funny.

And I have a new cover on for this week, to mark my third (week) birthday. It has lots of sheep on it. So many thanks to Jaqueline and Jules. I am also managing to grow and am now 36cms long - thats huge, I'm sure you'll agree.

Lots of love
Arthur x