Amelia was born at 36w0d (exactly 1 year ago today...
)
I had steroid shots at 28 weeks, so keep this in mind as I go on...
She was born (via c-section) with apgars of 8 and 9. She was good to stay with us in the operating room for about 10 minutes. Then they took her to the nursery where she had to receive oxygen because she begun to have a lot of trouble breathing. The nursery's cutoff for going to the nicu is 4 hours and 15 minutes on oxygen...Amelia was on oxygen for exactly 4 hours, so she missed the cut-off for the nicu.
When she got to my room, she had very wet lungs and grunted a lot. She had absolutely *no* suck reflex. She couldn't nurse, couldn't take a bottle, couldn't suck on a finger, nothing. They ended up having to tube feed her for a couple days. After each feeding (which occured after each time she tried to nurse), they brought her back. She had a lot of trouble maintaining body weight, so she stayed in naked chest to chest kangaroo care almost the entire time.
Another issue she had was that her blood sugars were really low. After a couple days, it was fine.
She had to stay in the hospital a few extra days because of her breathing. When they discharged us, she developed very bad jaundice, which stuck around for a month. That first month, all she did was sleep (23 hours a day), had a LOT of trouble nursing and couldn't latch on--we had LCs come to our house several times a week trying to get her to nurse right, and she still had problems breathing.
Right when she turned a month old, everything seemed to change. She stopped being jaundiced, she started being able to suck better, and she started the typical sleep-wake pattern (I'd say she was still a very sleepy baby for about 3ish months).
At a year old, she is pretty much on target for most milestones--she has 2 words, she takes several steps by herself, points, eats like a champ, and looks to have no delays. Her ped says she needs to use a corrected age for 2 years, but really, she's on target for her actual age. The only long term effects we see is that she still gags on anything but breastfeeding and solids (but she gags on spoons, sippy cups, bottles, binkies...so pretty much she nurses and finger feeds herself), and she has selective immunoglobulin a deficiency. I'm not sure if the S-IgA-D is related to her being early though....
Most of her issues are very mild in comparison to what could have happened. She, for the most part, did quite well with just a couple minor issues.