so i have a few minutes to write. ahhh i should be vacuuming or something but shoot i am lazy...and enjoying these quite moments. we bought a swing over the weekend and let me just say this thing is a miracle worker. Bennet LOVES it! seriously the best thing ever. we were using a bouncy chair a ton but we have a cat and i was terrified he would try to get up on her while i was in the other room. thus the past few weeks i got nothing done. now she is up higher and moving and the cat doesn't seem interested in her at all! it has allowed me to put laundry away and pack Bennet's newborn clothes away {which is terribly sad:(}
so i said i would write about our little (by little i mean BIG) emergency room visit...here it goes (cue tears)
so Bennet has been such a great sleeper at night. this is good. back when she was 11 days old she wanted to nurse pretty much every hour and a half ALL day and then at around 5 or 6 at night she would start drifting off for the night (oh by the way my baby fights her naps ALL day LONG! so she would be exhausted in the early evening) since birth she has been a very alert baby and at night she always woke herself up for a feeding around every 3 hours. so saturday night pete and i put her down around 9pm for the night and we quickly got into bed ourselves due to exhaustion and pete was leaving on the road for a few days of shows at 6am. my mom was coming down the following day to stay with me while he was gone. i quickly fell asleep. at around 2am i woke up thinking oh weird she hasn't woke up to eat yet. so i go to get her up and nothing. she is breathing and responding to touch but will not wake up. i tried to get her to latch on and was successful only with her putting it in her mouth and sucking 2 times in 20 mins. so thinking she is just being a newborn and trying to figure out a schedule (ahem no naps during the day) i put her back to bed and set my alarm for 4 am thinking surely by then baby is gonna be hungry! 4am comes around and still nothing. nothing could wake her up. changing diaper, cold wet wipe, strip naked, wiping face with wash cloth, temp taking...nothing. pete and i got up and decided that she would wake up if we gave her a sponge bath. nope. not even the sponge bath. pete is starting to worry. i am too but hiding it. i seriously just thought she is being a newborn who is super sleepy. also i thought when/if we call the peditrician she would just send us to get Bennet's heal pricked to check her billirubin levels again. so i calmed down and told pete that at 8 she would be up and starving and everything would be fine. pete had to leave and woke me up to say by telling me to call the doctor if she still would not wake up and to not downplay it. i reassured him i would and everything would be fine.
8am...still nothing! are you kidding me. i was so worried. pete was now gone and i was gonna have to handle this all by myself. called the doc (once again thinking i will have to take her to get her heal pricked and that would be it) and she proceeds to tell me that i need to take her to children's er. what?!?! she tells me they will have to run some test and we will go from there. i could barely get off the phone before the tears started flowing. called pete and through my sobbing i told him what was up. he was stuck on the bus driving away from us. it was so hard for him and he was freaking out. i calmed down bc i realized i would have to drive my new baby for the first time and that was scary. i get to the er and walk in a total mess. i make out what the issue is and let me say the Bennet is still asleep at this point. they take her and strip her down, check her weight and that is when she wakes up. they take her temp...no temp so that is good. they take us into a room and put her on this huge bed. nurses and doctors come in and start telling me they need to get a urine sample (using a catheter) and get blood (put iv in) and get a spinal tap. ummmmmmm....what??? can't you just prick her heal and let us go home???? not good. i call pete hyperventalating telling him to get home! they wanted to keep her for 48 hours to monitor her. the only good news that happened was that thankfully my mom and the bus would be crossing paths so pete was able to jump off and get in the car with my mom. God is good! pete called my close friend katie to have someone come sit with me bc i am a mess. the doctors had me leave the room while they tried many times to get a vein. i was laying on the bed while my baby was SCREAMING while they dug around her little hand and arm with a needle. complete mess. so i sat right outside. i couldn't leave her. but i know i was making the situation more stressful for Bennet. katie and her husband got there and we prayed and sat and cried. they took us to a private waiting room and my friends lori, jenny and jill all came up. seriously i have such great friends. all of our families live out of town so we def are each others nashville family. it is so nice to have that comfort. we sat and they let me back in to see bennet. she was finally not crying but laying in this huge bed in this cold room all alone. my heart was completely broken. i just got as close to her as i could and talked to her and rubbed her little head. after a while they kicked me back out to do the spinal tap. ugghhhh. i did not want to leave but knew it probably would make the doctors more at ease if i did. i went back in after they finished and tried to nurse her cus people my boobs were FULL and they hurt. i only got her on for 5 mins before she just passed out tired. i decided to let her get some rest (she had been crying now for a few hours) and i would try again in a couple hours. i pumped and let me tell you i filled up 3 bottle fulls in no time. my friends went and got lunch for everyone and we just hung out in the room waiting. they were all such a great comfort. they made the most horrible day less horrible. at around 3 pete and my mom finally got there. i just held on to pete forever. i took them back to see bennet and we all just lost it. pete had been driving for 4 hours not really knowing what was going on but me sobbing to him on the phone. my mom told me he lost it a couple times on the drive. i can't imagine how long that drive must have felt for him. after a while they moved us up to our room for the next 2 days. we had such wonderful nurses and doctors and we knew Bennet was in good hands. basically they wanted to watch the cultures they got from her urine, blood, and spinal fluid and see if anything grew on them. if it did she could have a UTI (urinary tract infection) or something more serious of a virus. they gave her some antibiotics just in case. so we just kinda had to wait it out. if nothing grew on them after 48 hours that would be good and we could go home. if something did grow we would have to take it from there. they told us that %97 of the time that babies come in being super sleepy they don't know what made them that way. this was good. we didn't want to know. bc if we did know it would be something serious.
so the days went by. by the first night she was waking up on her own to eat every 2 to 3 hours and having lots of dirty diapers. this was good. the next day she seemed like herself. she was alert and eating and napping like normal. the doctors told us nothing had grown so far! yes!
finally after 48 hours they sent us home. nothing grew. we don't know what made her so lethargic. but we got to go home with a happy, healthy, alert baby!
i battled with the doubts of doing the right thing. yea the peditrician told me to take her to the er. but was that the right thing? did she go through all that pain and crying for nothing. if i would've just waited another hour would she have woke up on her own and had a normal day? i will never know. but what i do know is that its better to be safe then sorry. what if something horrible had been harming her and i didn't act? i don't even want to think about the possibilities and i know i did the right thing. my baby won't remember the pain or this hospital visit. i didn't scar her. and she is healthy. thankfully. thankfully.
everything has been normal since then. we had our er check up visit with the peditrician and everything is great. then a couple days later we were back for her 2 week visit. everything still great. God is so good. we had so many people praying for our little baby girl. the prayers def were answered.
{mimi(my mom) meeting Bennet for 1st time}
{sleeping in her big bed}
