Thursday, June 19, 2008

Transfer of care...let the taping begin!


January o8- a new year...a new beginning. We transferred Reid's care to Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital in Cleveland from the Cleveland Clinic. Rainbow is the number 5 children's hospital in the US and number 1 in the Midwest. We found it to be inviting and on the cutting edge in terms of care for cleft kids. This was more like it. They work as a TEAM...dental, orthodontists, craniofacial, speech, physical therapy, occupational therapy, ent's...and so on. YES! This is what we were looking for. So, we met our team and began getting to work. Since Reid was already 2 months old, we had some work to do. They like getting cleft babies at 1-2 days old to get them all set for their NAM device. So, since Reid was older, we knew we had to be aggressive with the taping. Which we were. As you can see, Reid didn't seem to mind the taping too badly. Love that smile.

We found through trial and error that Steri-Strips work best...not the crummy tape that our team provided. Theirs was supposedly waterproof...but not spit-up proof because it would fall off instantly once Reid spit up. Well, with Reid's reflux...that was going to be an issue. So, the steri-strips did the job. We also used Mastisol to secure the tape in place. This also was a life saver. Both items are expensive...but we learned that you get what you pay for. It was WELL worth the money to have the tape stay and not come off every 5 minutes. Much better! Also this month, we went to a Medela Haberman Feeder for Reid. He did great. He was able to "chew" on the nipple to get milk out, and we could ditch the syringes for awhile. Yeah! Mommy is happy!

1 comment:

amanda said...

Before you had the NAM, what was your method of taping Reid like this? We can't seem to get it right with Camden.