Weights and Measures – Blogging for Prematurity Awareness
Wednesday, November 19, 2008 23:32
1780g* – that’s how much our little girl weighed when she was born. She was 41cm long. Why do I know this? Well it isn’t because I have an odd infatuation with the metric system. It’s because she spent her first 46 days in the NICU, where weights come in grams, length in centimeters and feedings are measured in millliters.
Our daughter’s first meal was 1ml of breastmilk, through a nasogastric (NG) tube. She ate every 4 hours, and her feeds were increased by 1ml every 12 hours if things went well. When life starts out like this, with seemingly everything hinging on single milliliters of milk or grams of weight, you become a little exacting about things.
The day we came home from the NICU, I knew exactly how many milliliters of breast milk she needed to take per hour (we were bottle feeding expressed breast milk), and I charted all of her feedings. When she was hospitalized with RSV, I reported her feedings to the nurses in milliliters too. They laughed at me, because while most parents would say, oh I don’t know, she took 2 or 3 ounces a few hours ago, I knew with certainty that she had taken 45ml at 14:00.
Long after the focus on weight and feeding faded, I was still measuring out reflux medication in doses that were measured down to a tenth of a milliliter and I was debating whether it was time to switch from the 0.31mg Xopenex vials to the 0.63mg ones.
But, times have changed. Just like we eventually stopped counting her age in months, we also stopped measuring everything in grams. Now, we measure her in pounds, about once a year at her well child check. Don’t even ask me how many grams 30 pounds is . . .
* For those who were wondering, 1780g is about 3 lbs 15ozs, and 41 cm is a little more than 16 inches.
CaraM - TheHouseholdHelper says:
November 21st, 2008 at 5:41 am
Again Kristie, bringing tears to my eyes remembering those days.
When little dude was in the NICU I was forced to learn what I called “Hospital Measure” and tracked everything in both pounds/ounces and grams/milliliters.
I also pumped breast milk and tracked every mL that he ate until he became such a hardy eater that I couldn’t keep producing what he wanted. So it was mixed with formula, then just formula. Even then, I tracked and logged EVERYTHING for his first 18 months.
Kristie says:
November 21st, 2008 at 9:46 am
I almost forgot about tracking my pumping, and transitioning to formula once my milk supply couldn’t keep up. I always knew her stats in pounds and ounces too, to tell family when they called. I like grams a little better though, because then you could still see they were making progress, even if they hadn’t gained a whole ounce!