one of the advantages of living in the state of michigan is that it seems to have a fairly good set of support services for preemie babies and their parents. as i’ve written about previously, in addition to our “regular” insurance, eric also qualified for medicaid since he was in the nicu for longer than 30 days. and he’s also qualified for other supplementary support programs that help pay the bills and provide access to a laundry list of services.

in addition to helping to pay the bills our county provides home health nurses that will stop by and weigh him and take his length and make sure we’re not falling apart at the seams.

today was the first day the nurse dropped by; she was very nice and kept commenting how great odin looked. it was impossible to not secretly wonder if she’s evaluating how suitable we are as parents and scribbling notes about not cleaning up all the dog hair laying around. but all-in-all she seemed fairly harmless and didn’t seem like the kind of person who would take odin away for not keeping an obsessively clean abode 🙂

note that this is not the same home nurse that will come and administer his rsv shots, so we’ve got a lot of nurses coming around the house.

he hasn’t gained any weight since his last weighin, which could be cause for some concern if it continues to not keep up his weight gains. overall, he’s gained an appropriate amount of weight since leaving the nicu, even though he hasn’t added an ounce in a week. but if he’s still sitting at 6 pounds 10 ounces in another week, we might need to think about nursing him less often since he doesn’t get any caloric fortifier if he’s not getting a bottle. the lack of fortifier combined with the increased energy that it takes to nurse could be the cause of him not gaining weight.

then again, it might be that he’s just in a lull before packing on a few more pounds, so we won’t make any changes until we see the results from his next weigh-in.

the home health nurse also measure his length which was about 19.25 inches, which means he’s grown over 7 inches since he was born!

the final for kris’ hospital stay finally came in the mail. remarkably, we only owe $500 on the $15,000 bill after insurance pays their part! i don’t really know how we could owe so little since we have a 10% copay, but i’ll take a break wherever i can get it. we still haven’t seen a bill for little odin’s stay in the nicu, but i’m guessing that it will probably be well over the intial estimate of $1 million USD. luckily, his medicaid coverage picks up the tab for everything that our insurance doesn’t pay for, so we haven’t had to pay a dime for any of his care.

in some small way we’re lucky that he was in the nicu for longer than 30 days and qualified for medicaid, since otherwise we’d be in a world of financial hurt right about now.