Jasmine Stalker-Firth

Since getting back from my parents, we have had a quiet few days. It has been lovely. Neil has started going to the gym again as he was feeling unfit and taking me for walks around the place as he has noticed my distinct lack of exercise and the fact that none of the clothes I wore during the time I was pregnant with Jasmine now fit and I still have 16 weeks to go. Still my mum bought me a lovely red top which I love and wear all the time and Jasmine likes to chew it too.

Today it was freezing but Neil put Jasmine in the sling and made us all walk around the Arsenal stadium. It was pretty good as Jasmine was toasty warm inside his big coat and we all got some exercise and got to listen to the crowds inside cheering on their teams. Then afterwards we went to pick up more milk at our corner shop and they had run out of the nice cake (iced madeira) we keep eating so we have eaten grapes this evening instead.

Not much else going on. I have been feeling quite tired as you can tell by the picture below as we have had a few late nights with Jasmine vomiting and pooing everywhere. Her sixth tooth is finally through today and it looks like her seventh might be on its way. Today, she vomited A LOT even by her standards and so has absorbed most of her last bag fill (the dialysis fluid which stays inside of her peritoneum during the day and carries on dialysing whilst she is off the machine) which made the machine beep like mad tonight when I connected her.

Jasmine is now making a determined effort to tug her catheter out everytime she gets the opportunity i.e., when we change her nappy. So we need our wits about us when nappy changing. This catheter tugging loosens her exit site dressing and causes the tube from her stomach to move about and causes blisters on her stomach. One healed up nicely with a bit of sudocrem and we found another one today under her dressing when we were changing it, so we can’t rub cream on it. I have taped her catheter down so it is harder to tug on and won’t loosen the dressing and her catheter shouldn’t be able to rub on her tummy. Fingers crossed that this this works and that it won’t set the alarms off on the machine, as the slightest change in the way her catheter lies can cause it to kink when she kicks her legs about and set those alarms off on the hour every hour ALL NIGHT. She is really funny in bed and manages to get her feet out of her sleeping bag so that she can wave them about or leave them sticking in the air whilst she sleeps.

The other morning she slept right through until 9am (recovering from yet another bug) and when I woke up I kept staring at the clock as I couldn’t believe we had all had that much sleep. This morning though it was back to 7am projectile vomiting and the rest of it.

Her kidney urine output has gone back up. When she first came out of hospital it was about 200mls per 24 hours and then it went right down to about 40msl/24 hours. Just lately it seems to have increased and Neil and I couldn’t agree by how much so we had a bet on and did a fluid balance (very sexy, you weigh her nappies for 24 hours to see how much urine is generated) and I was right it is now back up to 100mls per 24 hours so Neil owes me a small box of the pink foil-wrapped heart-shaped chocolates from the corner shop.

Jasmine is very clever and generous and when she chews on her toys she puts them in our mouths for us to chew on them too and then takes them back again. She recognises the music to In the Night Garden, as I sang it to her today when I was changing her nappy (catheter distraction technique) and she kept looking at the TV to see if it was on. Her other impressive talent is that she can lift the flaps herself when we read her Dear Zoo and she laughs at the animal noises we make. I guess this is in part because giraffes and camels don’t make much noise and according to Grandad Stalker mine sounded like cows and hyenas. Very cheeky! Jasmine joins in with the chimp noises to show me that they are the funniest ones to make.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 31st, 2009 at 10:29 pm and is filed under home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.