This is a portable apnea monitor. As my daughter was premature, we were not given a choice on that she was required to have one in order to be discharged from the NICU. Understandable initially, as she, like many premature babies had shown the tendency to have episodes of bradycardia (low heart rate), and it was nice to have a safety net at home to know if something were going wrong at any point.
How it worked was that our baby had two nodes strapped to her chest, that fed into an eight-foot cord, which was hooked into the monitor itself, which gave real time pulsing green lights indicative of her heart rate. At any point if the baby registered more than 20 seconds of a slow heart rate, elevated heart rate, or shallow breathing, a piercing beep would emit from the monitor, along with the illumination of a red light next to whatever icon indicated the event.
The beep was soul-piercing to hear, and the red light was looking at the eye of Sauron.
At first, we’d experience events a few times a day, as we learned as parents on how to be parents and how to hold our child, feed our child and generally handle our kid in the optimum manner to avoid putting her in situations where she’d be at higher risk of triggers. But as babies tend to do, she began growing rapidly, as mythical wife and I started to gain experience with handling her, and eventually the number of events began reducing to nearly nothing.
As time passed, the necessity of carrying around a box the size and weight of a school textbook and the long, tangly cable that ran with it began to grow increasingly frustrating, especially to me, as we as new parents, wished to expose our child to more of the world, and not just keep her in bassinets or the Mamaroo, but it began to feel like a literal ball and chain. The number of events were next to nothing, and I was eager to find out when we could be without it.
During a visit to the pediatrician, we were told that two months no events, and then we’re good to go.
Two months?? I was pretty livid.
I understand that the monitor was always a safety net, and the rationale behind equipping us with it is of nothing but the best of intentions, but at the same time, I genuinely was beginning to feel as if it were a very unwanted hampering to the experience of being a first-time parent, wanting to raise his kid without any cumbersome baggage literally strapped onto her.
It’s bad enough that thanks to fucking coronavirus, my side of the family has yet to meet its newest edition, but my kid is growing so rapidly, and has been doing so in spite of having a fucking machine strapped to her the entire time. I want to be able to walk around my own home with my own child without this machine, and I got to the point where I was stating that I hated the monitor more than I hated the baked potato in the White House, and that I wouldn’t wish this onto any new parent, even the people in the world I might loathe the most.
But three days ago, marked two months of no events.* We got the green light from the pediatrician to send for the return of the monitor, but upon their blessing, all this shit came immediately off my kid.
*there may have been one, but the monitor was starting to trigger false events, on suspicion of the wires that had been yanked, tripped and pulled so many times over the last few months and was acting up
Today marked the first day in which my baby was truly wireless, for an entire day. And god as my witness, it was one of the most refreshing, liberating days as a parent I’d ever felt. I picked up my baby and carried her downstairs without having a box slung over my shoulder and a wire endangering my feet down the stairs. We walked through the entire house and did some laps. She came and did laundry with me, and went to check the mail. When we went out to pick up some takeout, there were no wires sticking out of the carseat, and no monitor to be mindful of when shutting the door.
It was among the best days of being a parent, since she’d been born, and I have a hard time expressing just how overjoyed I am that she’s freed of the monitor and we’re putting that chapter of her life behind us. More than ever, I look forward to doing a litany of other things with her, now that we don’t have the ball and chain attached to her anymore, and I genuinely feel for any parents who have or will need to be put in similar circumstances in their lives.
