Sunday, July 22, 2012

Days Without Incident

When Nate first came home from the hospital last August, he wasn't in great shape.  His oxygen would drop dangerously low on a regular basis and it was up to me and Scott to revive our blue little boy.  A few times we had to call the paramedics and ended up back in the hospital, but most of the time we were able to stabilize him at home by suctioning, changing his trach, and/or using a manual resuscitation bag.  Those days were filled with constant anxiety.  We considered it a feat to make it even a few days with an incident. 


That's when we started a "Days Without Incident" counter on our chalkboard.  We considered an "incident" anytime he had a significant loss of oxygen and had to be resuscitated.  There was a lot of going back to "0" on that counter.  Gradually these incidents got less and less frequent and we stopped counting altogether.  I think it's been well over 300 days now.

Nate is so much healthier now, and we are so much better at taking care of him so it's easier to prevent scary situations.  These days we consider it to be an incident when he poops all over his sheets or his feeding tube comes disconnected and he's sitting in a pool of his own stomach contents all over the carpet (thank goodness we're renters).  The "Days Without Incident" counter still gets updated from time to time though.  I like to remind myself how far we've come. 

2 comments:

  1. I couldn't be more grateful, or more proud of you and Scott -- and of course, Nate. You are heroes!

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