Scenario for you parents: You have finally gotten your baby to fall asleep after a particularly restless night. You crawl into bed completely exhausted. Then, just as you have lost consciousness, someone walks in and wakes up your baby.
This happens every night. The best nights are those where it only happens twice.
The reason is that Clara has to have her vitals taken every four hours. This process includes temp (this is easy), O2/pulse (also pretty easy), and blood pressure... Blood pressure is loud and causes Clara to wake up. This is even more of a problem now that she isn't on any pain/nausea meds that make her sleepy. She is very easily woken by someone prodding at her.
So every four hours at night: 8pm, midnight, 4am - all when Clara should be asleep. Plus 10pm for chemo, 2am blood draw, and other various awakenings.
Saturday night was pretty close to our breaking point. Brooke is nearly crazy with the lack of more than four hours of continuous sleep. So we came up with our plan: we laid out a wonderful argument as to why taking blood pressure in the middle of the night was not helpful. The main point being that they wake her up and she starts to scream which causes wacky blood pressure readings.
So the next morning we start our negotiation process. We asked for more than we thought reasonable so that we could back down to just getting rid of blood pressure readings:
US: "Can we drop the midnight vitals?"
Doc: "Yep"
Wow, that was easy! Why didn't we do this a few weeks ago? On to a better nights sleep!
5 comments:
I mean, c'mon. How long does it take the docs/nurses to realize, "hmmm, I'll bet we might be disturbing them or something."
Consider that the docs might be reasonable people who were just following protocol. Reason may win the day!
I remember those days I can sympathize with Clara, it seemed every time I would go to sleep someone would come in to wake me up, either to take vitals, give meds, or just to see how I was sleeping. Then the Nurses would wonder why I was a grumpy five year old who didn’t want to do anything. Brooke also I doubt they still have the plastic sheet liners, on your bed, I used to wake every time mom would move because of the noise the sheets made on her bed.
Hallelujah! Ask and ye shall receive. AND...Mimi is coming! I will take some nights and you guys can go home and SLEEP!!! Only ONE MORE WEEK!
WHAT? You get to go again?!!?
Just tell the docs that they don't want to meet THE LAUREN.
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