Monitors

One of my close preemie Mom friends and I were having a conversation regarding her son's surgery he had on June 8th.  Which was a success :) We ended up getting into a deeper conversation about how scary it is....surgery....vents....monitors.....vitals.......etc.  It brings back scary NICU memories :(  After this conversation it got me thinking a lot about how crazy it is that an object can have such a huge impact on your emotions, feelings, hopes, and fears.  Your relationship with an nonliving organism becomes real and somewhat human.  This particular object to me is a monitor.

I know that sounds completely crazy, but there is good reason behind things sometimes.  I do not believe my blog followers are ignorant, but I will give a brief low down on what a monitor is for those without a medical background ( Raymond and I's knowledge of this field was forced upon us, so do not feel bad if you don't know what this is!).  A monitor, well.....it's shaped like a computer screen or a TV, but it serves sooo much purpose for the medical team.  Basically on this screen you can monitor the patients pulse, respiration's (amount of breaths being taken), and O2 sats.  O2 sats from what I gathered during the babies NICU stay means the percentage of oxygenated blood in your body (this was always the big one to me).  100% is perfect 1% you are near your end to put it bluntly.  I am sure the monitor can do a million other amazing things, but those are the 3 important main reasons for it, at least for myself.  They monitor those body's states by attaching what is called "leads" to the patient.  Leads are the sticky circular shaped things sticking on the patients chest... like what you see on movies and the thin cords coming from them attaches to a device attached to the monitor and that is how it reads those 3 states in your body.  I am sure there is much more intelligent terminology for what I just described, but I am not the lady to give those words to you...haha!  For my many many medically intelligent friends out there do not hesitate to correct me if I am wrong about any of the above.  You will not offend me at all but enlighten me and the other readers :)

Back to my point........I have a love/hate relationship with monitors.  For me they symbolized much more then what your body's systems were doing. When the monitor is "good" and alarms aren't going off like mad that means you are getting better and your loved one gets to go home sooner than later.  When the numbers aren't good and the alarms are going off constantly that means your loved one (our babies in my case) are sick and they have to stay in the hospital or they need greater assistance...this brings me to my other hated item, the VENT (that is whole new blog post that I will probably never do because my human relationship with the vent has a lot of not nice things to say!)  I remember when I was in the NICU, I stared at the monitor like a complete psycho for hours and hours.  I just sat there, rocked my babies, and stared at their monitors. Whatever those monitor were saying when I left determined my feelings for the rest of the day/night.  Sometimes when I was holding one of my babies I would see a number get almost or right close to setting the alarm off and I would beg the monitor in my mind to not let it go off......"please baby just breath so it goes back up!"...or..."don't you dare set the alarm off you stupid monitor!"  There were several occasions where one of my babies would totally crash (that is horrible by the way)........I was standing there and all of the sudden an alarm goes off and all those number start rapidly dropping....and dropping.....and dropping.  You feel like your heart fell to your feet and you quit breathing with each number going lower and before you know it everyone in the room is gathered around my baby trying too, "bring them back".  They are bagging or intabating or whatever they can do to get them going! Whenever this would happen in front of me I won't even look at my baby, I would stand there and stare at the monitor begging it in my head to go up..Up..UP.  I've seen that monitor have numbers less than double digits or not being read at all and it's so hard ...so scary to see.  It symbolize so much to what is important to everyone that loves the patient.

I have also loved the monitor.  Those beautiful sats.....97% - 100%!!!!  :)  Turn the oxygen down and it stays.........98%  it barely even changes a number!!!!  I could practically skip around just talking about how happy and exciting it makes everyone feel!  Woohoo!  Good job monitor!  It's like hitting the big one on a slot machine!  Then you are told if baby can breath without oxygen it will be soon they can go home, or  baby is breathing over the vent and sats are good....we can extabate (take the vent tube out and let them breath nasal canula).  Those were the happy moments, but I must admit sometimes I stared at the monitor during those times, "don't you dare screw this up monitor!!!"  Sometime it listened sometimes it didn't.  Regardless, I have been on both sides of the fence with it.

The reality is, it's not the monitor that is causing the numbers it was my babies, but it was just the bizarre relationship I couldn't help but establish.  I do not believe I am the only person that has viewed an object in certain circumstances as kind of a "human relationship" or like, if I really think this in my mind maybe it will listen to my thoughts and do what I want it to do.  I mean we have all kicked and yelled at a pop machine right?  No I wasn't talking to it or cuddling it to make the monitor like me......it was just the way my mind, heart, and feelings wrapped around it.....the monitor of all things.   The results on the monitor, well that is up to the patient and of course a much higher power than any of us are!