The Leads

Remember that post about the monitor? Yea, I know that a couple of days ago seems like nearly an eternity to us too. In that post, I eluded to the leads that actually hook the monitor to Liam – so here is their story.

There are five individual points of connection between the monitor and Liam (insert asterisk here, one of them actually goes to the bed): three of those are on his chest, one on his belly, and one on his foot. The three that are on his chest are the ones that are responsible for monitoring his pulse and his respiratory rate and get changed at every bath or whenever they decide to stick to his clothing instead of his body. Throughout out stay here, we have become educated in a lot of things, one of which has been how to place those leads on Liam, and how to best remove them with as little chance of pain as possible – although there is probably no physical way of doing that completely.

The lead on his belly – in the photo as a golden bear – is actually a temperature sensor that is hooked into the bed. The computer then uses that information to control the amount of heat that the warmer puts out to keep Liam at a certain temperature: 36.5 celsius. For some reason, this lead and wire are the most difficult to deal with and like you computer cables at home, will always become knotted and tangled no matter how perfectly you placed it last time. I think that it’s because it’s got a heavy connection point on the end and a small flimsy wire that it will just knot itself with no warning and with no easy ability to undo it.

Finally, there is the lead that is attached to his foot – and it changes feet each day just so it isn’t always on one or the other. This one’s primary concern is Liam’s oxygen saturation levels, but also serves as a backup pulse monitoring lead. This one also causes us some frustration on a near daily basis, but it’s because Liam like to kick his legs and that motion causes the lead to not register that well. It is also temperature sensitive, so if Liam’s feet are a little cold, than it doesn’t like to work as well. And of course whenever it doesn’t work, the alarm sounds.

Since it is known that there are five leads, you would correctly surmise that there are also five different cables that have to be managed, along with the four different IV lines. All of these together create quite the mess and quite the entanglement. We spend time after each bath attempting to organize them, but that only lasts until the first time that you pick him up and sit with him in the chair. Most of the time it isn’t really an issue – even when they are messy – but it does reach the point where something has to be done. It’s an impossible and never ending task to keep them clean.