[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="640" caption="Anya's feet complete with oxygen monitor"]
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As far as we were concerned, it wasn't the prospect of
Bob Katter holding the future of Australian politics in his gnarled hand, but Anya's decision to stop breathing.
First things first: she's absolutely fine now, which is why we're out of hospital and I'm currently typing this in bed with her lying in a bassinet beside me wriggling and whimpering and yawning.
But her decision to stop breathing in the early hours of 22 August was, understandably, one of the most horrible moments of my life. Here's what happened.
After the birth we were moved into a double room where Kate was struggling to get sleep. Our roomie, on the far side of a couple of curtains, was a Thai woman whose Australian husband had a vast extended family which trooped through in huge numbers during every minute of visiting hours; outside of visiting hours, she was on her mobile phone to her own friends and relatives back in Thailand. That meant that it was impossible to get sleep during the day, and also impossible to get sleep at night when I was kicked out of the hospital and Anya started squeaking and mewling until Kate cuddled her.
48 hours in and we were moved to the heaven of a single room, where I was even allowed to stay the night. But Kate had still barely slept, so when Anya started crying again I took her off to the tea room to settle her and sleep. We slept for a while but she went on grizzling so I took her off for a relaxation bath in the ward bathroom (floating in warm water is great for settling babies - they almost forget that they've emerged into this horrible dry cold world). That went pretty well so I changed her nappy, wrapped her up, and started heading back to the tea room.
Now I hadn't managed to wash my hands in the bathroom as there wasn't a handwashing sink in the room, so on the way to the tea room I wheeled her bassinet over to a sink opposite the nurses' station to wash my hands there. I'd barely started soaping my hands when one of the nurses called out: "She doesn't look right!", and swept her up onto a recovery table in a small room just three steps away.
In the few seconds when I'd been washing my hands little Anya had stopped breathing and turned quite blue, and immediately there were three or four nurses around her giving her oxygen, checking her pulse and breathing rate and trying to get a measure on her blood saturation using a laser device that attached to her foot and made it glow like ET's index finger.
After that is was all a bit of a blur - Anya quickly went pink again but the nurses and doctors kept on taking measurements and watching her; I woke Kate; and we all went down to the special care nursery, the lowest of three levels of intensive care for newborns and preemie babies.
Anya stayed down there for five days, including two days in the high dependency unit, the next level up before intensive care. The staff informally called her scary moment a "dusky episode"; more formally, it was labelled a "desat", or "
desaturation". This because when she stopped breathing the oxygenation of her blood would drop dramatically, lowering the O2 saturation you'd normally expect to see from 90%-100% down to 80%, 70%, even occasionally below 60%. The ET foot probe was measuring this factor, and it showed that in the first few days down there she was having several desats each day.
There were several possibilities that were looked at, tested for and ruled out as causes for this. An early possibility was an infection - her belly button looked a little red when she was moved down, and she was put on a course of sweet cherry-flavoured oral antibiotics which she found absolutely yucky. But some blood tests showed that wasn't the case. There were also concerns about an anatomical problem in her trachea or heart, but x-rays of her chest and ultrasound scans of her heart and head ruled out any problems there.
This left the most likely and most common cause of such desaturations: a fairly simple coordination problem. In all of us, a single throat splits into a windpipe and an oesophagus which are carefully kept separate from each other. When we breathe, our oesophagus is closed; when we swallow, our windpipe closes. This is a pretty useful skill to stop ourselves from choking on our food and sending it down into our lungs, but it's not always smoothly there from birth. Anya seemed to be choking longer and more frequently than she should have been; the only solution, the doctors said, was to wait for her to get the hang of it.
For the first few days she continued to have occasional desats, so they took her into high dependency where she was put into an incubator and on a drip for 24 hours. Whether it was the timing or the environment, that seemed to do the trick - after a day there she'd had no more dusky episodes and was moved into a normal bassinet again; and after 24 hours more there she was allowed to move back up to the postnatal ward with us.
Obviously we've now got a spiffy movement monitor in her bassinet because we're ultra-cautious about her breathing, but she's been fantastically energetic and vigorous ever since her time in special care. During, even: the nurses said that during one desat when we were out of the ward, they had been trying to remove a dummy from her mouth but her suck was still so hard - even when she wasn't breathing - that they'd needed all their tug to pull it out.
She's just sat next to me now having a feed and is thriving. She put on 110 grams in three days after moving out of hospital, which is a bit like me putting on three kilos in as many days; when she's hungry, the vigour of her scream is proof positive that she's having no trouble getting air into her lungs, or out of them.
