Saturday, February 17, 2007

Monitor Compliance


I admit it. I am terrible at the apnea monitor. I hate the stupid thing and I don't want the extra "peace of mind" that it is supposed to give me.

William has lots and lots of loose lead alarms- usually just after he has gone to sleep after screaming for an hour or two. All the jiggling and rocking and patting causes his leads to become a little loose and the machine goes crazy. I hate it. So I turn it off not to wake him and then I forget to turn it back on. Bad Mommy.

The other night we lost power due to a drunken college student taking out a telephone pole near our house. The battery on the monitor was low before we lost power and then I couldn't charge it for a few hours after that. Can they take my baby away for being so monitor non-compliant?

I also don't like being tethered to it. I bought an awesome sling and I don't use it as much as I'd like because I would need to also carry the monitor around. Blah.

I can't wait to be done with the thing.

3 comments:

Jessica said...

Hey Lisa~
Do they have you using the sticky leads, or a felt monitor belt? The sticky leads work MUCH better (although still a pain). Hope you can get rid of it soon~
Jess

~k~ said...

Ohhh... what sling did you get? Does William like it? Pictures!!

I hope you get to ditch the monitor soon, too. The doctor gets a printout of the "alarms" right? What are they saying about the periods of non-use?

Emily said...

We had Noah on a home monitor for 10 months so I consider myself a bit of an expert on the topic. If you take the sticky leads and wrap them in a full circle around a snap on pjs or a onesie, when William moves it will pull against the snap and not his skin (so the contact stays the same - no more loose leads). This made a huge difference. We went from having almost constant loose lead alarms the first month or two to only having them when the sticky wore off and we needed to change the leads. As Noah got older we needed to wrap them around 2 or 3 snaps (he was stronger and would pull on them), but I'm sure William won't need the monitor that long.