The Aftermath

Today is day 11. 11 days since s arrived and as a family, things have changed a lot.

g has been really good to s. She has been very affectionate, at times, too affectionate. She, being only 2, does not know her own strength or her own weight. I am saddened to report that g has been acting up a lot lately. I don't really blame her. In the last 2 weeks, she has been through an upheaval.

She had to deal with the evil nanny. G started working 2 jobs, one in the morning and another at night. Her whole daytime and nighttime routine has changed. Then I went into the hospital for a couple of days. s came home and has not made any attempt to leave. In the span fo 2 weeks, her whole life changed and she doesn't understand why. She doesn't understand why her daddy doesn't give her baths anymore, why he doesn't read her bedtime stories and put her to sleep.

That's why she is really acting up on areas that she can control. Not wanting to eat. Not wanting to sleep. She would freak out over the smallest things, about how she had wanted the blue crayon and was handed the red, about how she wanted the pink shirt and not the white one. I feel bad because I have been the heavy for these last 2 weeks. I have been the one to keep her in check, to tell her that she is not allowed to hit, not allowed to do this and that.

I hope that she will come to grips with everything soon. She is becoming such a wonderful little girl. I can't help but stare at her constantly now. In comparison to s, she is such a big girl in every way. It's hard to imagine that she was once this small.

s is doing better now. I had thought that since I have experience with this already, the second should be a little easier to deal with. We came home from the hospital and I have noticed that s seemed so sleepy. That is normal. So we proceeded with life for the first few days. On Monday (we returned home on Saturday), I just noticed that s seemed to be getting even sleepier instead of the opposite. When we brought g home, she was sleepy for all of a day. Then she proceeded to not sleep at all, but that's a separate story. Feedings were getting more difficult because she would just doze off. I thought that maybe she didn't like the taste of my milk. So I tried to give her formula. That didn't help much. I called to make an appointment to see the doctor on Tuesday morning just to get her weighed and examined. We went that morning. The doctor said that she looked jaundiced but it didn't seem too bad. He sent us to the lab to get the blood test asap. She got tested and found that her bilirubin level was 15, which was good news in the sense that though it was elevated, it was not enough to be dangerous or require any phototherapy.

We went home and proceeded with the rest of the afternoon. Then I noticed that s never really woke up since we had returned from the doctor and the lab. In fact, she endured a heel prick and the squeezing of blood from her tiny heel without waking up at all. She responded to touch, to the cold, to diaper changes, but she never really opened her eyes. So I called the doctor again and told him that she has not been awake since we returned from his office at 10:30 AM. The doctor told us to meet him at the hospital. G was at work. Gmom was going to have to take care of g and I had to bid her a screaming farewell. I took s to the hospital and waited. They took another battery of blood test. They hooked her up to an IV and since she was already there, the doctor decided to hook her up for phototherapy. The blood test results were not good. Her bili levels went up to 18. Again, not critical but the fact that it was a upward trend is not good.

That was one of the longest night of my life. They gave us a foam eyepatches to safeguard her eyes during the phototherapy. We stripped her down and placed these things on her. They were so obviously uncomfortable and worst, they would not stay on. So I had to constantly adjust.

They had told me that the phototherapy machine had a heating unit to keep the baby warm despite being naked. I believed them. s wouldn't stop crying though. She would only stop when I held her. Her extremeties were getting cold. I was feeling so torn. s would only stop when I picked her up but if I carried her the whole night, we might as well discontinue the therapy. After 5 hours of this, one of nurses finally realized that the type of phototherapy machine that they gave us did NOT have a heater. There was scramble to find one that had a heater. The best they could do was to give us a heater unit. So the arrangement was the heater unit was positioned above the phototherapy unit. There was a sensor on the heater unit that sometimes detect that something is obstructing the patient, so it will issue a LOUD beep. That was my whole night and day, hitting the reset button to stop the beep alternating with rearranging the foam eyepatch on s's eyes.

The next day, s's bili levels kept a steady decline. We were finally discharged around 9:00 PM. I hope that is the end of that.