After meeting with the doctors and seeing our little fella for the first time, we came home in a bit of shock.   I had given birth to two very healthy babies and Anthony was healthy as could be as well.   I had never been in the NICU with a baby nor do I remember ever being around anyone in the hospital that used that many machines just to stay alive.  I would go up every day after work and stay for a couple of hours and then come back home to see the rest of the family.    At the end of May when school got out for the summer, I started going up every day.   I think there were only two days that I wasn’t there and those two were more than enough.   It bothered me not to be there and I’m sure I worried the nurses with all of my calls to check on him but sometimes you just have to take care of business outside of the NICU.  During those next few months, Jacob had several procedures/surgeries.   They put in and tried a couple of different peritoneal dialysis catheters trying to be able to do PD.  Jacob was assigned his own private room and his own private nurses because he required someone to change his cycles on dialysis manually.   They also had ALOT of information they had to collect during and after each cycle.  It was ALOT to take care of and it was ALOT for me to try to learn.   Luckily, I had some of the best teachers!  Jacob was also given a MIC-Key button to administer meds through and eventually he had the feeding tube through his nose taken out and we were able to use his button for feeds.  That was a huge blessing to us because that eventually freed up an iv line.   There were some very frightening days for us while we were in NICU.   I actually learned a lot about the different blood levels, what they all meant and what those numbers needed to be.   I remember joking with a few of them one day about how I was ready to be a nurse because I had learned so much but I could only be a NICU nurse for a baby with kidney failure.   NICU is an amazing place at ACH.  Although my little boy was not healthy at all, I saw and met so many more families who were much less fortunate than us.