3 West

3 West is the pediatric cardiology unit on the regular hospital floor. We are in a room that contains four patients – and they are all babies. That’s right, four sick babies all trying to rest and heal. It doesn’t work. The nice thing is you can sleep (actually, you are expected to be with them) in the room. I actually think I got more sleep the night we were life flighted here. Or, I could say, I don’t think I got more than 15 minutes of sleep at a time. It’s worse than bringing home a newborn from the hospital. There was always one baby crying, or an alarm going off or staff talking loudly in the room or noise in the hallway (because someone left the door open), or someone snoring. One patient clapped incessantly. That same patient was moved out of the room in the middle of the night. Then housekeeping came in to cleanup and bring in a new hospital bed.

Hana did not sleep well although she thankfully slept better than me. It was nice to have her so close. I really miss our ICU nurses who took such good care of her. They do extraordinary work. I’m not saying that the nurses up here aren’t good, I like Jeffrey, our day nurse, but our night nurse wanted to weigh Hana at 4:30 in the morning. I asked her to wait until at least 6:30. I thought people would be more concerned about patients getting rest, maybe by lowering their voices a bit when a baby on the other side of the curtain is trying to sleep, but a good number of people seem completely unaware. I’m going to wait another day before I say something, maybe our first day here was an anomaly. The other thing I’m not used to are nursing assistants and residents. There were only fellows in the CVICU, no residents. I think having the CNA’s are good because they will hold or console babies when no parents are around.

Hana is the same as yesterday. The only changes they are making are to decrease her Ativan and decrease her volume if breastmilk but increase the calories by fortifying it. She’s been kind of cranky, probably because she is overtired. I know I am! One of the heart failure/transplant doctors said, best case scenario, she could be discharged as early as next Friday! It will still be many months before we know what course all of this will take, but for now she has been declined for the transplant list. (That’s a good thing!)