As a parent seeing your child ill is one of the most heartbreaking things. I've just come home early from church because sitting there I can tell my daughter isn't right. We've had a great run of health recently but I think there maybe something lurking at the moment. You have to put up with coping with ill children as a parent and for us it started when our daughter was just 4 days old. Feeding didn't seem to be going as well as I'd thought it should be and our baby was just getting yellower and yellower so I called the midwife who sent someone round as I had mentioned that she was yellow all over. When the midwife was asking me how yellow she was on the phone and where it had spread to I kept questioning "am I giving the right answer" when there is no right answer! A bit like at the optician and they ask you which circle is clearer I can never really tell and end up double guessing myself about whether I'm saying the right thing or not! Sorry I digress... The midwife visited us and weighed our daughter who had lost well over 10% of her birth weight in four days which along with how yellow she was set alarm bells (she was 7lb8oz when born and was under 6lb I think at this stage) looking back at pictures I can now see how hollow her cheeks were. We were sent into children's A&E on a Friday afternoon and as new parents we were already shell shocked and this noisy, busy A&E was sending our already high stress levels soaring but our newborn didn't make a peep she just lay there dozing. They checked her bilirubin levels and they were high, extraordinarily high and her levels were on the blood transfusion line on the chart. They wanted to rush us up to the special care unit as quickly as possible and kept apologising for rushing so much, except I kept thinking if this is rushing I'd hate to be here when you're taking your time. She was then given a quick drip and a slow drip to get fluids into her plus a bottle of formula and put straight under the lights which is the normal treatment for jaundice except that she had 3 lights on her rather than one. She was also given a lumbar puncture because some blood tests showed that she might have an infection so antibiotics were also started. There was so much going on it was hard to process it all. But the staff on the special care baby unit were amazing and looking our girl a full term baby compared to the other very premature babies in the unit made us realise how lucky we were.
Over that weekend I didn't sleep much, we were given a room but even when I had the chance to sleep it felt like my body had forgotten how to switch off. Our daughter responded really well to the treatment with her bilirubin levels dropping immediately and they stayed down when the lights were switched off and when her infection results finally came back it was an all clear so we could go home on the Monday evening. Jaundice isn't always serious and most of the time babies clear it up themselves but prior to that hospital visit I didn't realise that it could have serious consequences. I saw this article earlier this year and it made me so relieved that I'd called the midwife when I did because if I'd waited until her day 5 check up the next day the situation may not have resolved itself without any lasting damage.
Those were some of the most stressful and scary days that I've ever had but we came through it and in some ways were definitely better for it. The help the nurses gave me for breastfeeding was invaluable and it went from strength to strength when we came out. It took me a while to get my confidence with it so I was still breastfeeding then topping up with expressed milk or formula for a couple of weeks until I felt comfortable that she was getting enough. It also made me realise to trust my instinct which I hadn't always wanted to do in those first few days for fear of being classed as a "paranoid first time mum". But now I think so what if you are a paranoid first time mum? At least you have the baby's best interest at heart.
Hopefully my daughter with a dose of nurofen will sleep whatever it is off this afternoon, we know she's strong and a fighter but it's still tough no matter how old they are to see them poorly.
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