At the NICU

It has been a ROUGH few days for this new little family of 3.  On Saturday we got released from the hospital and went home.  We thought everything was fine and we were all doing really well.  Then on Sunday things went down hill.  We realized that it had been about 12 hours since Jude had a poopy diaper and that he had only peed once in his whole short life, on Friday evening and hadn’t since then.  We called the after hours pediatrician line and our doctor told us that he might just not be getting enough to eat because S’s milk still hadn’t come in.  So she had us after every feeding try to give him about half an ounce of formula to see if that got things started and to call back at 5 if he still hadn’t peed.

The formula helped get him to poo and at 5:00, he did the deed, though it had been at that point almost 24 hours and only the 1 diaper.  So we called the Dr. back and she told us to feed him an ounce of formula once he was hungry again and wait an hour and half to see if he would pee and if he didn’t she wanted us to take him to Dell’s Children’s hospitals ER to see if he had any sort of blockage.  So by 8:00 he had eaten the formula and still not peed so the ER we went.

At the ER they practically tortured the poor guy.  He had blood drawn, his vitals taken, an EKG done on his heart, an ultrasound on his bladder, two antibiotic shots, spinal fluid drawn and an IV put in.  The IV was the worst because they figured out he was dehydrated from not getting enough to eat and so it took 3 nurses, the anesthesiologist, and 3 NICU nurses to finally get it put in and of course each person tried twice before the next person stepped in.  They finally got the IV in place on his head.

They thought that his heart rate was lower than normal and that between that and dehydration they thought it was possible he had an infection so thus all of the testing being done and being finally after 5 hours in the ER, being admitted to the NICU at Dell.    So it was a bad night.  I don’t think I need to describe how we felt through all of this because you can imagine how hard it was to see all of this being done to him.

At this point S’s milk has come in and so they are having her nurse him, then pump and then feed him what she pumped with a bottle.  So far this is working great and between the breast milk and IV he is back to his normal self.  They are keeping him here till noon tomorrow just to make sure his vitals stay normal and all of the cultures come back clean.  So they are thinking his heart rate is just naturally low and that everything else was being caused by hunger and dehydration.

We will let you know how things go but they are looking up at this point.  Here is the little guy all hooked up to a million machines.

Still cute as a bug and twice as sweet.  Little guy luckily has slept through most of this and only gets upset when they take a band aid or sticker off of him

-Liz