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.
