The big news around our house is not what has come in, but what has gone out. Our bookcase has a nice empty spot on top of it right now.
This nice little machine used to sit there. This was Kyle's pulse oximeter that we hooked him up to every night to make sure his reflux, of which there was plenty, did not enter his lungs. Or, at least didn't do so enough to impair his oxygen.
When we first brought Kyle home, I relied on this machine to make me feel like I was doing enough to keep my baby safe. I cursed it at times when the alarms would go off because of a bad read. Some nights it felt like I could hardly sleep because of it. I knew that without it, I would also hardly sleep out of worry though. It gave me peace of mind when little else did. As Kyle grew older, his reflux didn't cause his oxygen levels to decrease as much, and, because of the machine, we knew that his oxygen always rebounded as soon as he worked the spit up out. The machine now only beeped at us when it was malfunctioning. Our insurance authorization was about to expire a few weeks back when the probes quit working. It was around midnight, and we didn't have a backup, so we went to sleep without the machine on. A few days later we called our home health supplier and asked them to pick it up.
It was so nice to be sending medical equipment out the door never to be seen again.
The other item we've removed from our life is this:
Kyle's food no longer has to be fortified to increase the calories. He is on straight mama's milk and doing well. In fact, the little man has tripled his birth weight!
