Babies

Today I sat in on NICU rounds which proved to be quite interesting. My preceptor this week is 30 weeks pregnant and there were a couple of babies in there who were born earlier, so she said she was having a kind of odd feeling about that. I can't even imagine. The smallest one in NICU right now was born at 28 3/7 to a mom who reports not knowing she was pregnant. She went to the bathroom, had a BM, and delivered 2 feet, then proceeded to call an ambulance. Anyhow, so we were calculating the infant's current intake and thought that we were doing something wrong when we were going form absolute numbers (total kcal/day) to relative (kcal/kg/day), because the numbers went up from 71 kcal/d to 74kcal/kg/d. Until we realized the math was correct - she didn't even weigh 1kg! It's amazing how little the feedings are for these teeny-tiny ones. I'm hoping to follow up with this baby over time (even after I'm done with this rotation), since she'll probably be here until the end of July, too.