Despite how exhausted we were, Scott & I took plenty of pictures that first day in the hospital with Luke. We just couldn't take our eyes off this perfect little person. He was like a sleepy, blinking, squeaking, floppy sack of flour with wrinkly skin and downy hair and the most angelic grimaces and grins.
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| [Lion King.] |
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| Watchin' dad |
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| First conversations. (Look at all that hair!) |
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The view from mom's bed. (I kept moving his little cot to different spots
in the room, trying to get him closer to my bed. It took me a few days at
home to clue in to the fact that it was just easier to bring him into bed
with me!) |
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Pretty bright-eyed and bushy tailed for only being
8 hours old! |
Luke was born at about noon, and the rest of that day was so busy with wonderful visitors and hearing tests and all the little interruptions of the hospital that he didn't get back from his after-birth bath in the nursery until about 11:00 PM. When he got back, the nursery nurse had bundled him in 3 blankets and a shirt; we assumed it was just because it was late and cold in the hospital or something.
Well, the thermostat in our room was kind of broken, making our room extra hot. When the newborn nurse came in to take his 1 AM vital stats, his temperature was up around 100 degrees. Scott and I were pretty groggy (for obvious reasons--we had just fallen asleep around midnight for the first time since 3:45 the morning before, and, um, we had just had a baby and all), but I still remember the nurse seeming pretty agitated about that temperature reading. She quickly undressed him down to his diaper, started fiddling with our thermostat, and kept whispering to my nurse who had come in for my 1:15 AM vitals. (I don't know how anyone expects to sleep in the hospital!) I guess a "fever" of two degrees is a big deal when you're only 13 hours old.
In any case, it was a fake fever. They took his temperature again after about 8 more minutes (and then again 2 more times over the next 5 minutes) and he was consistently back down to 98, just like any good little boy should be. Obviously he wasn't sick, he was just overdressed. Real fevers don't disappear in 8 minutes just by taking off clothing. Unfortunately, that "fever" temp got recorded on his chart, without any notation about the clothing/bundling issue.
We didn't think much of it until the next day. The hospital's pediatrician looked him over at rounds that morning and said he could do his circumcision that morning. He asked if Scott and I wanted to come watch the procedure, and after thinking about it for a few minutes, we (stupidly) declined because we decided we could use the sleep. Stupidly because right after he was finished with the circ, the doctor looked over his chart, noticed the temperature spike the night before, and decided that Luke immediately needed a blood sample workup and blood cultures, because obviously he was probably terribly, terribly ill. (Eye roll.)
Poor Luke boy! Every nurse on the floor tried to get enough blood for all the tests ordered out of his little heel (the sticks didn't heal for weeks) and his hand (couldn't get a hold of his rolly-polly veins), until finally they got the special care nursery director to do an arterial draw. From what I could gather (no one would tell me much!), this involved making a slit in one of the arteries in his wrist and essentially pouring the blood out.
It was at this point, about 4 hours later, that Scott and I were awoken by my nurse coming in for my 4-hour vitals checkup. I was surprised and concerned that it had been so long and that neither we nor my nurse nor the nursery nurse seemed to know where my baby was; they had assured us they would bring him right back to our room after the circ. I hobbled out of bed and started asking nurses all over the floor (the nursery, the nurses' station near our room, the desk, etc.) where my son was. Finally one of the nurses at the desk went back to the special care nursery on the other end of the floor to figure out what was going on, and we started getting bits and pieces of the story.
When they finally let me see my baby, they were taking him in for the arterial draw. Goodness, it makes me shake just to type this! I was angry and terrified and confused and guilt-ridden. Things had been escalating all morning without us knowing it: Preliminary blood work showed elevated inflammation indicators in his blood (ya think? He was just circumcised!) and low blood sugar (oh, really? When you hadn't let me feed him for 5 hours straight?). These, in addition to the temperature the night before, convinced the hospital's pediatrician that Luke needed to be admitted to the Special Care Nursery.
The SCN is like the next step down from the NICU--all the monitors and wires, but no surgery, and sometimes they'll let the baby even go back to the room with you. Luke was put on a heart monitor, blood pressure cuff, temp monitor, and IV line with a double course of antibiotics. To top things off, the SCN director that night decided that he needed to be under the bilirubin lights because his bili count was "borderline," and if he's sick, "we don't want to take any chances." The problem with bili lights is that I wasn't allowed to hold my son unless I was feeding him.
He's 24 hours old and I'm not allowed to hold him.
All because of some stupid blankets. The whole ordeal literally makes me ill to think about it. Long story short from there on out is that after finishing the 2-day course of antibiotics (and getting off the bili lights sooner than expected), everyone decided Luke was perfectly fine and could actually go home--hooray!
I think back to those hellish three days a lot now. Sometimes when I'm reaching the end of my rope with Luke, I say a thank-you prayer that I have a healthy, happy baby who didn't actually need the SCN or the NICU. Nights now when I can't sleep or he can't sleep (and therefore I can't sleep), I think back to his first 72 hours of life: I had to wake up every 3 hours to shuffle across the hospital to his SCN room, try to wake him up and get him to eat for about 20 minutes, put him back under the lights, pump for half an hour to try to get any last drops out, kiss him on the head, shuffle back to my room, try to get comfortable, and sleep for about an hour and a half before I got up to do it again.
I honestly don't know how parents of babies in the NICU do it. It's gut-wrenching to see your perfect little child strung up on wires and tubes in a plastic bin when all you want to do is snuggle them and smell their hair and wrap their tiny little hand around your finger. There is a special place in heaven for families that have to go through that for real, not just our fake little taste of it.
Anyway, we only took one picture of him in the SCN (on Scott's cell phone) because it's not really something I want to remember. I hadn't planned on blogging that bit of Luke's life because I hate thinking about it so much, but I felt a need to explain his saline lock (that's the needle & tubing & wires attached to his hand). I guess it feels good to get it out, too. We are so blessed to have such a strong, healthy little boy!
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| Milk drunk and dreaming sweetly. |
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| Check out those skinny little legs! |
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| Lunchtime with daddy |
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| We were SO exhausted. |
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He would make these heartbreaking frowns and grimaces in his sleep!
I had to keep telling myself that it was just his baby muscles working
out their wiggles, not bad dreams about doctors and needles. |
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| "A knuckle? Delicious! Is this where my food comes from?" |
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He had these deep old man folds under his eyes when he was born.
As he's gotten older and his face has filled out, they've kind of
disappeared and I miss them! |
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| So floppy! |
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It's crazy to see these monkey pajamas so loose
on him. He outgrew them in a month! |
Bonus video time: The first is a clip that we didn't even mean to take--we were trying to figure out how to take a picture. I kept it because it's just so cute to watch Luke go to town on my hand like that. (Obviously someone's hungry!) The second is a longer clip of how wiggly he often was in his sleep.
