[tri-med] What do you do - feeding pump broke at night!

We rent a Kangaroo pump from Apria.  We use it for all of Caroline's feeds, 
including her nightly feed where she gets the majority of her food and 
liquid.

Last night, after just putting Caroline to bed, her feeding pump broke.  I 
had just gotten a new pump since our old pump was due for a calibration.  We 
were so furious and unsure of what to do.  After about an hour of fussing 
around, we tried a gravity feed.  However, we really had no clue HOW to do a 
gravity feed.  When we woke up in the middle of the night, she had barely 
gotten any food at all.  My husband bumped up the rate of drops a little 
(who knows how much) and in the morning, we still had a ton of food left 
over.  She ended up getting about 1/2 (maybe less) of her usual feed.

What we did was use her regular Kangaroo feeding bags and her IV pole.  We 
"tried" to count the number of drops of formula running within a minute and 
tried to average out what the rate would be an hour.  We thought if we could 
get one cc within one minute, then we would be at 60cc/hr - close enough as 
she usually gets 50 cc/hr for 10 hrs.  Obviously, we didn't do so well.

Is there any official way to do this?  We have no clue, but I think we 
really need to know what to do in case this happens again, or if we have a 
long term power outage like we did a few years ago after a terrible storm. 
I hope that bolus feeds aren't the only option!

I am so frustrated!  I am going to call Apria this morning to get a new pump 
asap, but we are also on our way out the door for an all day dr. appt/fun 
day with the family (the dr' appt is about 2 hrs away so we are making a day 
of it).  We are going to have to bolus feed today (and she doesn't do very 
well with that) so it will be very small bolus feeds ALL day long.  UGH.

Any thoughts or experiences??  I wish we had a back-up pump but I doubt 
insurance would cover that.

Thank you!
Irene
(Christina -3  y.o,  Caroline - born 6/28/03 with partial trisomy 17p, AND 
baby #3 due 6/16/05)
http://www.babiesonline.com/babies/c/carolinerochelle 

                  Building ___ooOOoo__ Rainbows
                       www.trisomyonline.org
                  Families Helping Families On-line

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