| 2/19/2005 | |
| Day 2, Going Home? | |
| As usual Julie was brought into our room early on for her feeding. Our biggest concern for today is what to do about Ethan's third birthday party tomorrow. We are supposed to be discharged this morning. The debate rages over taking Julie to the party. It would be nice for everyone to get the chance to see her, but is it a good idea to expose her to that many germ-ridden people? Should she receive that much stimulation? Should we distract everyone on Ethan's big day? Idano, decisions, decisions... We wanted to get ready to go early so departure would go without a hitch. We asked when we would be leaving and the nurse told us we should wait for the neonatologist. We thought this odd since we had not seen a neonatologist since we got there. Doctor Rothchild, the substitute neonatologist, came in. He told us that Julie had an elevated C-Reactive Protein score on her last blood test (and apparently a number of the ones prior to this). This indicates that there is the possibility of an infection. As a precaution they will have to keep her in the hospital, on two heavy-duty antibiotics, for a minimum of 48 hours and up to seven days. Well, we found this very disturbing. Here we are debating over whether to take her to a party tomorrow and it turns out she can't even leave the ward. We wondered why this was the first time we had heard about this. They had been doing tests for days; they must have known sooner than just now. They also said that Julie would have to remain in the nursery so that she could be monitored and that Hannah could come in to feed her. Hannah and I were very upset. We went from taking her home to not even being able to hang in the same room with her except for feedings. They immediately took her to the nursery and wired her up. We went to see her and she looked so pathetic. The nurse assured us that everything was going to be just fine. That didn't stop us from shedding tears over our poor forlorn baby girl. The nurses gave us comfort in that they dealt with this kind of thing all of the time. Julie was going to be just fine. She just wasn't going to go home right away. We also took comfort in some stories of the staff's children that weren't allowed to go home right away. The nurses must have taken pity on us. The ward was relatively quiet so they offered to let us stay in our room, for free, until either they needed it or until the baby was discharged. During this time Hannah would be officially discharged, and thus we would get no meals, care, or medicines, but at least we wouldn't have to run back and forth from Hatfield and/or sleep on a couch in the hall for the next few days. They said that this was something they didn't always do (they just do it for "cool people"), and that we should keep it on the QT. This new development certainly made the decision regarding the party easy. It also made it necessary for me to run home. I had brought enough clothing for a standard hospital stay, but since we were prolonging that I had to run home for supplies. We had also determined that although the hospital had DirectTv, they made very poor choices as far as which channels they would pipe through the hospital. To that end I brought a number of DVDs back with me as well. We would play them on my laptop. Despite the blood test problem Julie continued to amaze us. At just over one day old she actually picked her head up and looked around. She seemed to respond to our voices as well. I guess that's the result of superior pedigree. She showed no signs of this supposed infection. Breast feeding continued to go well. We were starting to get to know her and she us. |
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