Sophia's Sleep Study Story

Friday evening was the night of Sophia's sleep study. The day felt somewhat hectic to me, I had to pack up our stuff to stay overnight at the sleep center and was generally feeling nervous about the whole thing. Sophia was not supposed to sleep after 4pm and we had to be there at 7:30pm....and somehow keep her awake on the car ride over. Michael came home from work and we had to eat dinner quickly and then give Sophia a bath before we left. We gave ourselves about an hour to get there....and probably arrived at least half an hour early, I guess traffic wasn't too bad, although there was a storm that started up on our drive. Check in was easy, sign this, sign that, and then we were shown to a room with a hospital like crib and a cot and a sink. A very nice worker, Mr. Tremane, asked us some questions about how Sophia sleeps, some family history type questions, and then explained that after I fed Sophia her nighttime bottle, he would come in and hook her up around 8:45 or so. We had a good hour and a half to kill at that point. We would have brought some DVD's, had we known that we could. Instead, we flipped through the two channels (one was some sort of surgery channel....a weird choice and definitely not an option given what we were there for) and decided to just let Sophia play as much as she wanted. We put some toys in the crib with her and stood at the side so she could crawl all around and stand up and stuff. The following is a picture of just that. She seemed happy and had no idea of what was to come (and really we didn't either).

She fell asleep as I fed her her bottle, which I expected. I was hoping that Tremane would just be able to hook her up while she slept.....I was WAY wrong on that.....in that there was NO way she could've possibly stayed asleep during it. When he came in, he had Michael and I go on one side of the crib and he was on the other. At first, she seemed to be liking him and what was going on. He put these things on her arms, which he called "angel wings", that kept her arms from bending so she couldn't grab or pull at anything that was going to be on her head and face. I was so worried she'd be upset by that (I would totally freak out if I couldn't move my arms like I wanted to) but she seemed ok at first. He had to put all this goopy stuff on different spots where he was going to put the leads....Sophia put up with it for a minute, but then she started to shake her head all around and tried to get away from him. He would stick the lead to her head on the goop and try to hold it for a minute to get it to stay and she wanted none of that. So Michael and I had to hold her. As in, hold her still. She was NOT a fan. And so, not that she was unwarranted in doing so, she started to scream. I felt terrible. Michael looked like he felt terrible. We were trying to hold her while he stuck over 20 of these little electrode things with wires coming out of them to her head, neck, near her eyes, ears, etc and she was just screaming and thrashing against us. At one point, I felt so upset I wanted to just go out in the hall and take a break, but I didn't want to leave my baby. After he finally got everything where he needed to, he took some gauze and wrapped it around her head.....she looked like she had been in an accident and had some sort of brain injury or something....I was having the hardest time not crying just looking at her. The last things he had to attach to her was something to her toe to measure her oxygen levels and something under her nose, which had to be taped to her face. By the time this was all complete, it was about an hour later. Sophia was exhausted. Michael and I were exhausted. Tremane left and said that if we needed anything to just tell him, he was going to be watching/monitoring the whole night. I held Sophia, who couldn't get comfortable even in my arms due to the "angel wings" and tried to rock her and sing to her. I was singing Mary Had a Little Lamb (one of her faves) and really almost started to cry....she was just looking up at me, so tired and so sad looking, like she couldn't understand what was going on. I think I switched to a more upbeat song, like a Backstreet Boys song, which I have been singing to her a lot lately and she likes. Finally, I am sure it was from total exhaustion, she fell asleep.
After that, Michael and I sat on the little cot and just stared at her. Michael decided that he wouldn't stay because he snores a lot and didn't want them to hear him snoring and not be able to pay complete attention to Sophia. I didn't want him to leave, but I also didn't want anything to make us ever have to do this again. By the time he had texted me that he was home, it was 11pm. I sat in the rocking chair near her crib until about 12:30 and just watched her. Then I got into the little cot and stared at the ceiling or at Sophia for another hour. I think I finally did sleep from about 1:45 to 3, when Sophia must've tried to turn over or something, realized she couldn't, and woke up crying. So back to the rocking chair I went, rubbing her back until she fell back asleep. Periodically, Tremane would come in the room and lean over the crib and seemed to rub her back as well....maybe he was adjusting something on her? I have no idea. I never said anything and neither did he, but I am sure there was a reason for it. And if he was just checking on her, that was fine with me too.
I knew that they were going to wake us up at 5am and that Michael would be back around 5 as well. My internal clock (and the fact that I wasn't sleeping deeply anyway) woke me up at 4:45 and then the next 15 minutes felt like forever. Finally, Tremane came in, at the same time as Michael and we woke up our little sweet baby girl. Sophia doesn't really like being woken up much (who does?) and she was a little fussy at first. The following picture was taken by Michael right after we woke her up and Mr. Tremane had taken off one of the angel wings.

Doesn't it just break your heart? As he started to unhook her though, she seemed to forgive him for hooking her up in the first place....she smiled at him and pointed at him and seemed like her happy self. I guess she knew she was getting out of there! I know Mommy and Daddy were happy to be getting to take her home. She still had a ton of the goopy stuff in her hair when we left so around 6am when we got home, we put her right back in the bathtub. And then Sophia and Mommy had a nice long nap together.
We should hear from our pediatrician in about a week regarding the results of the sleep study. Now that it is over, I still don't know if it was worse or better than what I expected. Michael said the same thing. To us, it really was hard to see our baby like that......but.....there were no needles, the overnight stay wasn't due to any injury or sickness....we know that there are so many worse reasons to stay overnight in a hospital. But still, we hope it wasn't too traumatic of an experience for her and also that the results will be positive in finding out how we can improve her quality of sleep (and maybe get her to stop skipping breaths if possible). I appreciate that Children's Healthcare hires people that truly care about kids....Tremane was great with Sophia, very patient and gentle with her. He said that she was great, that usually babies take it a lot better than 3-4 year olds. I could see that. My nephew Cooper probably wouldn't even set foot in the room, let alone let someone hook things up to him and tie his arms down. I am sure a lot of parents take it harder than the kids do as well. If it didn't traumatize Soph, it sort of did me!
I am very glad that it is over. I am glad that we didn't have to wait a super long time to do it, the anticipation would've surely built it up into something much scarier. However......if for some reason they ever had to do it again.....um, no thank you!!!