Saturday, August 25, 2007

She's Not A Good Bleeder

Yes, that's what the nurse said at the 9 month doctor's visit during the blood sample collection process.

To collect blood from an infant, they have a special baby-finger-pricking-device. So her finger starts to bleed. She does not make a peep. Then the nurse whips out this testtube connected to a tiny plastic straw (for lack of a better way to descibe it). She proceeds to squeeze Ally's finger, milking out the blood and gathering it in the tiny straw. If you have taking a baby to the doctor recently, maybe you have seen the insanity.

Ally was good for about the first six minutes, but then started to realize that some strange lady was milking blood out of her finger and smearing it everywhere trying to collect it in a tiny straw. She started to cry and struggle a bit (who wouldn't), and so we decide the only way left to try and console her is to sing. We started Old MacDonald with every animal we know. The nurse started to sing along. All in all, it took somewhere between 12 and 15 minutes to gather enough blood to run tests on.

Quotes from the nurse:

-"She's not a good bleeder"
-"Who invented this thing"
-Nurse: "I think this will be enough" Julie: "maybe you should take a little more so that we know it's enough and we don't have to start over" Nurse: "I think you are right".

At the end, we have to wipe the blood off of Ally's hand, and then the nurse gives us a band-aid to cover the pin prick on Ally's finger. There was a little scale problem, though.





Yes, an adult bandaid would go around Ally's itty-bitty finger about 30 times.

Then they came and gave her a shot.



Anyway, she has a clean bill of health and is gaining weight well. I'll post some more Ally photos soon!

1 comment:

Amanda & Edward said...

LOVE the comments part of the bleeding. Poor kiddo!! -Mandy