Emmylou's first two weeks

The scoop on Emmylou.

First the facts.

Inching towards the end of my labor, Emmylou's heart rate went up. Shortly after, mine did too. The nurse said that this is not uncommon for a labor so lengthy but if I spike a fever, I will have hit the 3 sign jackpot of choreo (an in-utero infection). Sure enough, a fever hit with about 6 hours to go. They did what they could to lower my fever with ice pack, they put me on my side to help with her heart rate, and they put me on antibiotics. With such a combination, high heart rates and spiked fever, it is routine for the baby to be placed directly into the NICU and given 7 days of antibiotic. And so that journey began.

Zach and I were counting down those days that seemed to creep by, just living at the hospital. On her first day, Miss popular had 10 visitors. But while she was there, she kept having spit up episodes. Although this is normal for a baby, her amount of spit up was quite large. On top of that, the content was green, indicating bile. This was concerning because her vomit should not be coming from a spot that deep in her gut. The doctors did like 5 x-rays, 2 ultrasounds, and that berium dye thing that I definitely don't know how to spell. Everything kept coming back normal until the dye test... where they saw a tiny narrowing in her intestine. Because the vomiting was not subsiding, they put her on the terrible, awful, no eating diet, NPO, to see if it would cease. It didn't, so they prepared us for her surgical options. The team decided that they would go in and cut that part of her intestine out, and then re-sew it together. This would be a recovery of 5-7 days until I could feed her, and then a few more days of monitoring. However, when they went in for surgery, they saw that her bowel was rotated and the stenosis (the narrowing), wasn't as problematic as they had thought. Instead of fixing them both, the surgeons decided to go the less invasive route and fix the rotated bowel (which they strongly believed to be the problem) only. This meant a much quicker recover because there was no cutting internally.

She continued to vomit bile. The doctors said that this very much could be post op behavior but they'd keep an eye on it. They pulled out her NG tube and the next day, she threw up 32 ccs in the last 24 hours. The NG tube went back in. They immediately extracted 12cc of bile... we are waiting on the surgeons to decide where to go from here.

Not the facts.

Zach and I are basically on the verge of crying at all times. I mean it's just insane what a roller coaster this has been. I think the worst part is not knowing when she'll be out. We have had several possible discharge dates that have all flown past us now. It's like when you're babysitting and the parents say they'll be home in 4 hours and so you properly partition your energy to last those four hours and then they show up 3 hours late. I mean you were just spent for the last 2 hours. That's what it's like.

But truthfully, we can find no reason to complain. Emmylou is the largest baby in the NICU by far and she is surrounded by 7 other babies. 6 of which are chronic NICU patients. In fact, her four pound neighbor came in yesterday and her parents took one look at us and said "why is YOUR baby in the NICU?" In addition, we hear stories about parents who aren't in the place where they can be at the hospital literally all day like we can, due to jobs or lack of transportation, or a long commute. But God, in His graciousness placed us in a house that is a 6 minute walk from our door to her bedside. I have a schedule wide open that allows me to stay with her constantly, AND we have more support than I could ever dream of. We would've had to switch our phone plan if I didn't have unlimited texts due to the vast amount of people checking in on her and I alike. She's had about 10 times more visitors than anyone else in that NICU and, her Mimi was able to drop everything and come out to support us after she heard Emmylou was going into surgery. In fact, after she found out, it took her all of 3 minutes to buy the ticker. On top of that, her aunt, Emily, swallowed her fear of flying to meet her and hold her and sing her Mary Kate and Ashley songs as she fell asleep. Finally, her Pop pop flew out for a weekend to see his little miss Emmylou and make sure she was doing ok. Not to mention that Zach's parents were able to come out as well. I'm telling you, the Lord has showered us in an abundance of blessings and each night Zach and I come home and praise Jesus for what He has given us in this hard time. He is faithful. Always always.