NICU Field Notes
During Gabriel’s six weeks in the NICU (he’s doing well, by the way, and in keeping me on my recent hiatus, doing very well), I hardly knew what to do with all of the information being dumped in my lap. Sure, I kept my family and friends informed with regular posts to a CaringBridge blog, but not once did I publish what I didn’t try hard to understand first. I looked up the definition of ROP every time I posted on it, just to be certain I knew what I was saying about it was true.
Sometimes, early on, it was all I could do to remember what one nurse said from one shift to the next, much less what the doctors were telling us. So I continued writing in the notebook I began the day GEB was born. In it I wrote everything: details, chances, statistics, treatment options, feeding schedules, unusual stories nurses told, observations about unusual nurses, gripes and complaints—you name it, it’s there. The notebook was the raw material of my time—and his. When I flip through it now, I am reminded of how religiously I added to it, how guilty I felt if I went a day and I hadn’t written anything. On more than one occasion I called GEB’s nurse at midnight, curious to know how he was doing, eager to add his daily weight gain to the table I kept. I am proud of that notebook—in no small way, I feel about it that it represents my first real connection with my son.
The notebook itself was a Field Notes brand, which I note primarily because the people who make Field Notes have a dorky but endearing interest in where their notebooks go and what they’re used for. They even keep a Flickr group and invite people to submit pictures of their own Field Notes notebooks. On a whim this evening, I obliged and posted pictures of my NICU notebook. Now I post them for you.
In this notebook I kept a daily record of my son’s 6 weeks in the NICU. What I wrote was mostly banal meal tracking, but it was comforting to keep good notes, especially during those early days when I didn’t know what way was up.
Here is the first page, begun while I was waiting to enter the operating room and ended at the end of the day when GEB was moved to another, less critical part of the NICU.
Every morning I called G’s nurse-of-the-day to make sure we didn’t miss anything overnight. They always reported his weight gain, so I took to recording it here. (Because he was in the NICU for so long weeks, the table takes up several pages.) I later transferred the table to a spreadsheet and made a chart.
