Baby's First ER Visit

Two hours after giving birth.

A day and a shower after giving birth....feeling much more human.

Having a baby is such an adventure.  And the first couple days of having a baby were a little difficult...not going to lie.  It would be less difficult, I think, if I still had my full (or even pregnancy impaired) amount of movement...but I didn't...because my nether region was a tad bit sore....you know...from having a baby.

We were able to have all of our son's grandparents come into town for the Memorial Day weekend and besides the aunt that he had in the delivery room, he also had an uncle come out from Texas to meet him.

But more on that later...except that you needed to know that we had plenty of people in town to help us and give us advice.

We got home from the hospital last Friday since I only wanted to stay in the hospital for 24 hours after having Zach.  I'm not a huge fan of hospitals and I wanted to get back to my own bed as quickly as possible.

Zach didn't want to eat at all.  This kid was TIRED.  After all of the drugs that had gone through my system and how hard the labor was, he just wanted to sleep all the time.

Saturday we found what we thought was blood in his diaper but we assumed that his umbilical cord stump had rubbed up against it and maybe got a little blood on it...no biggie.

Still continuing to try and breast feed even though my baby was so sleepy.  We even offered him formula in bottles because I was worried about him...but he slept through those too.  Kid just wanted to sleep.

I woke up Sunday and it was pretty clear that my milk had come in.  I had what I call "Bimbo boobs".  Just imagine...you know what I mean.  Luckily my mother-in-law was able to break the Sabbath (hahaha) and go and get me a breast pump because guess who still only wanted to sleep?

It was the same thing with the diapers that day too.  Only, he was only having about one wet diaper a day so we got nervous that he was dehydrated and someone (probably a grandmother) suggested that we get some water in him.  So we started to dropper feed him some water and breast milk.

Monday morning was Memorial Day.  But he was still having these crazy weird diapers so we started to worry and decided to take him to the ER.

We were there for SO LONG.  Seriously, like 4 hours.  We brought in a diaper for the doctor to look at.  He said had all these crazy theories.  One of them was that he might have a bleeding disease.  When I texted my mom that, she said, "If he had a bleeding disease, your horrible labor would have killed him already so don't be too worried about that."

A nurse came in to take some blood to do those tests and...do you know what you don't want to hear a nurse say when she is collecting blood for tests to find out if your son had a bleeding disease? "Wow, this kid is a really good bleeder."

I'm sure that that is a compliment in her world.

The doctor also thought he might have a urinary tract infection and they got a NICU nurse to come in and put in a catheter so that they could see if he had blood in his urine or if the blood was coming from further down.

Aaron couldn't look when they put the catheter in because it was way too uncomfortable for him to think about.  I sat on the bed with Zach and bent over so that our heads were next to each other...which was an amazing feeling since it was the first time in  months that I could do that with my body.

This was the face he made when the put the catheter in.

Yeah...remember what I said about him being too tired to eat?  Yeah...he is also too tired to care about getting a catheter put in at 4 days old.

Did I mention that my son was dehydrated?  We were waiting awhile for them to get enough pee. This is his tiny amount of pee that wasn't good enough.

Drastic times call for drastic measures.  It was time to scare the pee out of him.

After we took this picture, he peed so hard that the catheter shot out....but not before he get enough in the tube for the tests!  Thank goodness.

The ER doctor finally concluded that....we should see our pediatrician the next day.

Yeah...he said that he thought it might be a urinary tract infection but they wouldn't have the cultures to confirm till the next day but it wasn't a bleeding disease.

The night we were really nervous because they had told us that if it was a urinary tract infection he might have to be circumcised the next day because it was probably caused by him not being circumcised.

Long story short:

Urine Crystals

Apparently EVERYONE except our ER doctor has heard of them.  The pediatrician came in that Tuesday morning and said, "I told the ER doctor when he called me about you that that is what I thought it was but he didn't agree.  But...if he was dehydrated and now that he is hydrated they stopped, I'm pretty sure that that is what it was."  He was right and I'm so mad at the ER doctor for not listening and scaring us.

At that point, I still hadn't been able to nurse Zach and so the pediatrician told me to call a lactation consultant.  Two hours after I called and made an appointment and ordered an expensive pump from our insurance company, Zach woke up and figured it out.

So...ER trip equals waste of my time.