Saturday, January 11, 2014

2 Years & 3 Days

 

This is my now 2 year old..hard to believe it's been that long! It was a rough first couple of weeks for him. After the 3 am c-section, they monitored him with me for the first couple hours & when his blood glucose started dropping, gave him formula. That didn't work so they placed an IV & gave him Dextrose. That worked, but then his temperature started dropping so they placed him on antibiotics until cultures came back negative for infection. (That took a couple days) Cultures came back,they took him off the antibiotics and then his bilirubin levels started to rise (getting into the moderate range) so they treated that with phototherapy which effectively brought levels back to normal the next day. His temp came up a little bit, but after a small surgical procedure it dropped again & it was 3 days after that before it had come back up to where he'd be ok out of the hospital. He was discharged on the day before my due date.( a full 9 days in the hospital) I don't know if D had anything to do with it, I've never heard of any other normal or large D babies having this particular issue. Pediatrician said that he likely just needed those few extra days to incubate/regulate his temp. He was born at 38 wk 4 days, and weighed 7.3 lb.(aka the largest, most developed, kid in the NICU) it was still hard to have him in the hospital for so long & I cried every day for weeks. I really didn't have a reason to cry compared to some of the sicker the sick kids I saw in there but I did anyway, it was all very overwhelming. But he did get out, & my mom literally saved my life...driving me to the hospital to see him,fixing meals/helping with the baby & doing everything else when I got pneumonia & could barely drag myself out of bed.) Eventually I got better,& life became as normal as life with a baby gets. I'm so glad that there were no lasting health effects for him from that. If I could have told myself something prior to all of that, it would be not to get so upset over every little bump in the road...enjoy the journey. So many people never get to bring their babies home from the hospital. My post-pregnancy hormones were on a roller coaster, there was no hope of getting me to see things logically. I still think that it's sad that NICU babies aren't treated the same as a normal healthy baby, nurses who take care of you just see you as the patient, sans baby. And that hurts.

Still on my Tslim pump. Switched insurances, so I am going to have to start using Humalog when my current Apidra stash runs out. It's always fun finding out what your new insurance doesn't cover.