Still Trying to Count Sheep

Brian refrained from running over to the hospital last night to check on the munchkin and my 2:30am phone call had nothing but happy reports of peaceful sleep for the little one, so I was able to sleep peacefully throughout the night. 

Today brought on more bright eyed alertness from the little missy.  Eventually though, it caught up to her and she started to get fussy all over again.  The nurses solution is to first try to deal with the babies' irritability by giving them Tylenol.  I don't know why this has been effective for them, but I've seen it work with Olivia so I was willing to let them try it.  This time, it did aboslutely nothing for Olivia.  She fussed, tossed, turned and cried throughout the afternoon in between 15-20 minute cat naps.  Nothing of enough substance to really get her much needed rest.  Eventually her nurse gave her an oral sedative and she conked out around 5. 

I'm not a fan of medicating just for the sake of medicating, and in this particular case I really want to know what's at the root for all this newfound crankiness.  Moreover, sedatives will not be available to us once Olivia is moved down to the regular patient floor nor will Brian and I have access to it once we're at home so I'd like to try to be able to get her to sleep without the meds.  Our night nurse was a little more helpful.  She threw out a few different possibilities:

1. Most babies get their food through bottles, which we're currently giving to Olivia via an NasoGastric tube aka NG tube.  She's not expending any energy for her food while normal babies get tired after a bottle and drift off to sleep from the effort that was required to suck it down
2. Olivia doesn't have much visual or audio stimulation in her day to day for right now.  She's been in the same crib in the same room for almost three weeks and that gets old even to babies.  At home she would be getting moved from room to room and from crib, to swing, to bouncey seat, etc - another reason why babies tend to recover faster at home
3. The worst of the causes would be that she either has some residual pain from surgeries or an IV that is causing her pain or discomfort or she is experiencing a withdrawl from her long use of sedatives/pain meds following intubation and surgery

In total we are so lucky that the step down unit is in our forseeable future and as much as it pains me to see her so irritable these last few days...I know from just the other families on our floor that things could be so much worse.  We are still making forward strides and that is all that matters.