Fun with Jaundice

Looks like we're doing the jaundice thing again around here. I guess there's a tendency towards jaundice, now we've had two kids with that issue. On discharge, Riley was a little jaundice-y but nothing too exciting. He looked basically fine. But the poor kid hadn't pooped in a couple of days. We took him in for a routine blood test in the afternoon.

There's nothing like getting that alarming phone call, in the middle of dinner, saying that you need to bring the baby back to the NICU for in-hospital phototherapy.

Great.

We were pretty stressed out to hear that. For one, I don't generally like being in the hospital, and at this point, I'd already been away from my three-year-old for several days, and neither of us were coping well with that. Plus we were both very sleep deprived, and to be honest, completely freaked out by the idea of having to go to the NICU. But off we went...

Fortunately, I kinda knew what to expect (phototherapy isn't that alarming), and the nurses and the pediatricians were super-reassuring. They were fine with us staying in there with Riley the whole time (we did sleep shifts so one or the other of us could get some sleep since it was the middle of the night and he had to stay for about 15-16 hours). There was a reasonably comfortable chair in there, and curtains for privacy.

The night passed peaceably enough, poor Riley finally pooped, his billirubin levels went down quite a bit, and we were able to leave the following afternoon. Needless to say, breast feeding in public is getting a lot less weird for me at this point.