So I know I'm terrible at posting but now that I'm spending a few hours a day glued to the couch and I have a tablet, I might as well try again.
This is the reason I'm such a couch potato- we have a new member of the family. I'm using a blogger app so I don't know where the picture ended up but that's our new darling, Lucy Love. She joined our family on September 1st at 7:42 am. Because Pearl joined us via c-section, we went ahead and planned to cut Lucy out too. I figured that since I went into labor 2 weeks late, scheduling her delivery for a week before my due date would let me miss out on the lovely labor experience but it turns out that she was coming on the first even if I hadn't scheduled her to. One of my friends in VA told me that with her second baby she felt the contractions in her incision site and that definitely was what I experienced.
I don't remember much from the day Lucy was born- morphine really messes me up- but I vaguely remember them bringing her to me for a few minutes before carting her off to the NICU. I slept most of the day because there wasn't much else I could do and finally around 8 pm, they let me go see her. She was definitely a full term baby- 8lbs 9 oz (a pound and a half bigger than they thought she'd be) but because I moved from practically sea level to 8000+ feet during my third trimester, her lungs didn't develop how they needed to in order to handle the lack of oxygen up here and her blood sugar wasn't stabilizing like it should have and she wasn't regulating her temperature correctly.
The rest of my hospital stay was pretty much horrible. The NICU nurses complained that Lucy cried too loudly- seriously- and that she kept spitting up all over her blankets and refused formula and wanted to be cuddled a lot. I spent all day with her other than to eat and take my medicine and at shift change but that seemed to frustrate them too. I felt like a huge hassle. It was awful having no control. The second day, Lucy started having dry diapers because she wouldn't eat formula and my milk hadn't come in yet. Because I was in the NICU all day, I got to hear all the rounds the doctors and nps did and either they didn't know I was just behind the curtain or they didn't care because they all questioned whether I was the cause of her dehydration- lemme tell you how good that made me feel, worrying about my baby, doing everything I possibly could, and then hearing her doctors act like her problems were my fault.
Outside the NICU, people were much nicer. The doctors told me they'd have my orders changed so I could be discharged later if she needed to stay longer- which looked increasingly likely. The nurses were definitely supportive and nice as well but I really wasn't in my room much at all so most of my days were spent being stressed out. Pearl came to visit a couple times and I missed her like crazy. The last night we were there, I had Paul's dad give Lucy a blessing. They'd told me that the chances of us being discharged the next day were extremely slim and in a combination of stress and hormones, I cried and cried. I missed my Pearl, I was sick of being in the hospital, I wanted to go home. I had Paul spend the night at the hospital instead of going home. That helped a bit but I was still exhausted and frustrated at the prospect of at least one more awful day and night. After the night shift change we went to go sit with Lucy again and found out she had a different night nurse. She turned out to be such a blessing and a real answer to prayer. Instead of treating me like a horrible mom if I slept more than 2.5 hours, she practically ordered me to sleep and insisted that it was my job to sleep and have my milk come in and it was her job to try and get Lucy to eat with a bottle so that we could go home. I checked in a couple of times during the night but she told me to go back to bed because she'd been able to get Lucy to do what no one else had- take more than an ounce of formula without spitting it all back up. When I went in at 5:30 to feed Lucy, my milk had come in and Lucy hadn't had a dry diaper all night. It was wonderful and I felt so much better. Things stayed positive all day and finally, around 6pm, they let us go home with Lucy on oxygen.
She's a wonderful baby. She looks just like Pearl did with a bit of a smaller head and extremely dark brown hair- and lots of it. We were worried about how Pearl would handle us bringing home a baby but she was ridiculously excited. She's not really into being a little mama but I wasn't expecting her to be one. There's been a bit of drama because Pearl hates loud noises but she's already a million times better.
Lucy still hasn't made it back up to birth weight despite the fact that she seems to want to eat 90% of her wakeful periods but hopefully when she does we'll be able to test her off of oxygen. I'd like to enjoy my sweetie's face without a canula. Yesterday a lady stopped me and asked why she was on oxygen and it actually caught me off guard because I'm so used to seeing her with a canula that for a second I couldn't figure out how she knew. Come to think of it, other than when we change her tubes, I haven't seen her without oxygen. Lame. t
No comments:
Post a Comment