At Samantha's appointment on Monday, her doctor was able to see her holding her breath trick that she performs when she sleeps. He decided we should try an apnea monitor to see what was going on. Insurance approved it yesterday and around 6 last night a representative from the rental company drove all the way to our house from Shingle Springs. What a drive!
He showed us how to use it. How to test the machine, how to put the leads on her, how to use the little belt it comes with, how to read the machine, what the alarms mean and then set them off so we could hear the piercing noise that I'm sure even our neighbors heard. Then we practiced. We went over false alarms (he said many times caused by being too close to other electronic equipment and from leads going bad), real alarms and everything in between.
A couple hours later, it was time to get Samantha in bed. We put her leads on, put her jammies on over them and she was out like a light. The machine has two sets of lights. One is for her heart rate and one is for her breathing. If her heartrate gets above 225 or below 70 beats per minute, the alarm sounds off, if she stops breathing for 20 seconds, it sounds off. Loudly. He said part of the reason it sounds so loud is so that it startles baby into "behaving" which is a great thing.
Night one went great. She slept her 7 hours and then 2 more sets of 2. We didn't have any alarms, false or otherwise and the longest I saw the breathing monitor go without blinking was 15 seconds. I swear she is just trying to keep us on our toes!
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1 comment:
Our son is on one of those, too. It helps me sleep at night knowing I'll be alerted if something were to happen. It has gone off a few times due to the wires coming out or him wiggling out of the belt, and when that alarm goes off, I'm awake in a split second. Collen, on the other hand, sleeps right through it. I hope you get some answers about what's going on with her breathing.
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