Bradycardia

Having a premature baby gives one the opportunity to learn new medical terms. One of the first we learned was bradycardia. More commonly known as a brady, this term refers to a slow heart rate, and as mentioned in yesterday's post, bradycardias are one of the things preemies are monitored for.

As Buzzy's father describes a brady, "It's the thing that stops your heart. They always worried me more because it was something you couldn't see."

I have to agree with this assessment. When the monitor would indicate that Buzzy's oxygen levels had dropped, there was often a visible explanation for this. She became famous among her nurses for pulling out her nasal cannula. Even when she was having an apnea, we could visibly see that the stimulation we were giving her was working. Yet, with a brady, we could not see how her heart was responding.

So what was our response to a brady? As in many other cases, the rules change with a preemie. Where we would have taken precautions not to startle a full-term baby, with Buzzy, this is what we were told to do. The idea was to speed her heart back up, and what better way to do this than to scare the poor girl? Another common way to keep a preemie's heart beating at a normal rate is to give the baby a shot of caffeine. I mean this quite literally. Twice a day, a nurse would insert a syringe into Buzzy's IV to deliver the prescribed dose.

Buzzy certainly had her share of bradys, and the nurses would often respond to these occurences in the same jovial manner as they would apneas. "Stop misbehaving," one would say as she sanitized her hands and headed over to the baby's bed. Our daily inquiries into how Buzzy did overnight included similar utterances. "She was a good girl last night. She only had two bradys," one might say.

Going home taught us some new lessons about the body's development. As we came to find out, a baby's heartrate will slow down as he or she grows. This makes sense, of course, considering the difference between an adult's heartrate and that of a newborn. For Buzzy, this slowed heartrate came sooner than it should have, however, and this made for quite a few sleepless nights as her monitor would go off several times within a single hour. This went on for a couple of weeks before the pediatrician issued the order to have the monitor adjusted. With this order came the referral for a sleep study to investigate the cause of her slowed heartrate. After being hooked up to dozens of sensors and having her head bandaged like a mummy to secure them in place, Buzzy spent a restless night in the hospital. The results were inconclusive.

As with apneas, bradycardias are now a thing of the past for us, and looking back gives me the chance to see how far Buzzy has come in many ways. The tiny baby who used to give our hearts reason to skip a beat is becoming a spunky little girl who warms the hearts of everyone she meets.