So, we brought her home Thursday. Sunday night (or more correctly, early Monday morning) I got up to feed her at 3am. She felt hot so i took her temperature...100.7 (anything over 100.4 is bad) so then...woke up Trevor, stripped her, fed her, took her temperature again--same, called the pediatrician, told to got to the ER....now. Woke up Mom, packed a quick diaper bag and headed to the childrens hospital. (I must say, I was very impressed with the quality of care we received in the ER, we had just sat down when the nurse came to get us and within 5 minutes they had started treating her.)
The nurse told us that with a baby that young (mind you she is 4 days old at this point) a fever is critical because it means she has some sort of virus (either bacterial or viral) and no immune system in place yet to handle it. So protocol is blood work, a catheter to get a pee sample and a spinal tap to check her spinal fluid, oh and an IV to start her on antibiotics. Great. So I'm post-baby hormonal, running on no sleep, in the ER with my 4 day old at 4am and you want to do what? Yea...
So they took her into a "sterile environment" which I'm pretty sure was code for, obviously mom can't handle seeing this so we'll take her in the back...
She came back about 20 minutes later, but really you can't trust my judgement of time at this point, with an IV...in her head. The DR explained to us that they are running an initial set of tests that should be back in 45 minutes and then they sent cultures out which would take 48 hours to see if anything would grow. So...we are in for at least a 48 hour hospital stay. (and the blows keep coming) Ok, ok, processing that. The good news was her spinal fluid was clear, which apparently is good and she was fighting them (not lethargic), also good. Ok, ok don't get worked up about the "fighting them" part... So I got to nurse her and we waited for the test results.
Everything came back negative so now we were just waiting for room in the hospital to open up and we started her on the first round of antibiotics. Finally at 9:30am we were able to move into the room upstairs. A DR from our pediatrician's office came by and basically explained that the antibiotics were in case she had anything bacterial and they wanted us to keep her there for monitoring and drugs until the cultures came back. Probably she had what Trevor had (who had been sick with first a stomach thing and then a head cold since the day (literally) she was born). Also, she had jaundice which wasn't too bad but since she was already fighting something else she couldn't process it as well so they wanted her under the bilirubin bed/light with these blindfold things that had to wrap around the IV in her head...man she hated those things, so did Trev and I. So the next day or so consisted of them checking her vitals every 4 hours, administering 2 sets of antibiotics every 8 and her spending all her non-eating/diaper changing time it the "incubator" as we so unfondly referred to the bilirubin lamp/bed as. Poor baby. Poor mom and dad too, I'm not gonna lie.
There were other smaller stresses such as the pump administering the drugs breaking (I think we went through 3)...thus delaying the time sensitive medicine and giving us panic attacks, the blood pressure machines malfunctioning, went through 3 of those too, the incubator refusing to maintain the correct temperature, and her IV causing problems and needing to be taken out early. Sheesh. Like we needed anymore stress.
So, after 24 hours she was able to come out of the incubator (wahoo) and her temperature had normalized. The next 24 were spent waiting, administering drugs and monitoring her. Finally Wednesday morning we got the cultures back and everything looked good so we were released to go home. (big sigh) The consensus was that she had a viral infection and everything (the ER, the antibiotics, the IV, the spinal tap....were all precautionary and probably didn't actually help her at all). Great. So, processing that..
Here are some pics of our time there (camera phone quality). They are sad, just fyi, but I want them here for posterity.
So, that concluded her first week of life. It was hard. Really, really hard and I had to totally give her to God which was so scary, but comforting too at the same time. I felt a bit like Abraham...or at least I think I understand that story in a different way now. God was gracious and it wasn't serious and we are all home and healthy now. His grace saw us through but man, it was hard. So thankful to be on the other side now. So thankful to still have our beautiful girl with us. Man oh man do I love that girl. I had to wait a bit to type this all up because just reliving it is stressing me a bit. Ugg, glad to be done with it.
