The Car Seat Test

 After scrubbing my hands and putting on my patient gown, I made it to Harper’s room. I noticed she gained 47g yesterday, pushing her over five pounds. I sent a text to Aaron, who was running a couple of errands. Getting a baby to five pounds must have been the rule of thumb for NICUs in the past, because I had several people comment that she needs to get to five pounds before she can be sent home. 

A nurse comes up to me with a look on her face that indicated something’s not quite right.

“Hi, I’m Becca.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“Well, what’s your name.”

“Oh, hi I’m Chelsea.”

“They were going to do the car seat test last night, but they couldn’t get it off the base.”

The doctor of the NICU took a few days off this week and was being covered by another doctor. Harper was doing great with everything else: breathing, intake of oxygen, eating, and regulating body temperature, but she was having “events.” It’s very common in premies for their heart rate to drop as their brain isn’t developed enough yet. 

A nurse told me that a lot of times they don’t count it when they are eating. They are more concerned about the events that happened when they slept. Well, the substitute doctor was still counting these events, and we would have to start over for our count of three days with each event. 

The regular doctor came back yesterday and said she wasn’t impressed by these events and said if she continues to do well the rest of the day and overnight and can pass her car seat test, she can go home. She quickly became my favorite person. 

We were at the end of the day yesterday and her heart monitor wasn’t connected very well and it kept going off. In a panic I kept telling the nurses about how it wasn’t connected well, and of course they knew and weren’t concerned about it because they know way more than me about this kind of thing.

“They had several people try to come in and take the car seat off the base. They tried and tried and couldn’t get it off,” the nurse told me. 

“This is not going to be what keeps us from going home!”

“You can try, but you may have to get a new carseat.”

Despite my efforts, and later Aaron’s, that car seat would not budge. This has never happened to us. This has never happened in the history of BSA NICU. I don’t think it’s happened in the history of car seats. 

Aaron runs to Target, gets a car seat. He got it in pink because Harper is our last child and who cares about gender neutral colors at this point. After they put her in, we discover she is too small for the seat! I just about started to panic again when the doctor put a towel under her and it was perfect. Harper sits in it for two hours and passes no problem. She wasn’t a fan of it, but that wasn’t part of the test. 

So after all of that, I am happy to report that once the paper work is all completed, we get to go home! This is just more practice in being content with God’s timing. 

I told the nurse that the real car seat test was seeing how a couple deals with a car seat that won’t come off the base.