The Week in Review, Part II: Where the Baby Spent His First Shabbos

So, where were we...

We got up to the maternity floor and the nurse came in and asked me to rate my pain on a scale of one to ten. I thought about this, took an incredulous mental inventory, and said, "Um, actually I don't hurt anywhere." (This has since changed, but it was nice while it lasted.) Very different from last time.

MHH and I looked at the clock and thought, hey, it's only 6 am, and I'm set, and Barak is home with the sitter, and I just want to sleep, so why should MHH stick around? No reason to waste a personal day. So MHH, who is now being referred to as "Iron Man" at his school, went in to work and taught a full load.

And I took a nap, and nursed the baby, and Barak came with his sitter that afternoon and ate my granola bars and played with the controls on the hospital bed and the television, and ate my cookie and drank my juice from lunch, and looked at the baby (who was ten hours old) and demanded, "Hold it! Baby!" He didn't get to hold the baby, but he got to sit on my lap with the baby, and we got some cute pictures.

The baby nursed happily and napped and nursed, and I missed my husband, and I missed Barak, and I thought, I want to go home. So the next day, I did. But before I left the nurse came in and checked the baby's bilirubin level. She frowned. "This thing isn't working," she said. She got another forehead zapper, and checked it again. It was at 9, which is a little high. So she wrote me an order to come get the baby's blood bilirubin checked in the lab the next day.

Now, remember that we do not have a car. Every time I go somewhere I can't walk, I have to install a car seat either into a cab or into a friend's car. So every trip to the doctor or the lab requires one or two carseat installations--and I am makpid about carseats. When I install a carseat, I try to do it right, and this involves a lot of gymnastics and heavy-duty yanking on seatbelts. No matter how quick your labor was, it's not a smart thing to be doing the day after you have a baby.

But you have to do what you have to do, and so I took the baby to the doctor's to get his blood tested. And his level was 16. That was Tuesday. Wednesday, I went in and it was 21. The doctor called and said, I'm sending over a phototherapy blanket, and I want a lactation consultant to go visit to make sure he's eating. And tomorrow I want you to come and get his blood tested in the morning and the afternoon. The blanket arrived, the lactation consultant arrived and told me things I already knew. And we had his blood tested again. In the morning it had gone down slightly; in the evening it had gone back up. So on Friday, we went again to get his heel stuck for the umpteenth time. Both his heels are so sore and swollen that it was really hard to get blood, and besides that we had the Phlebotomist Who Needs to Find A New Career Path. Every other time we'd been there, I was told (by the other phlebotomist, who may keep her career) that she needed half a tube of blood for the test. This one said, at a third of a tube, oh, that's enough. I didn't think it was, and she assured me it was fine, and I said, okay, and we went home.

Well.

At around one, I called the doctor's office for the results of the test, and talked to a nurse, who said that the doctor would have called if there had been a problem. Okay, I said.

Two hours before shabbos, the phone rang, and it was the doctor, telling me that there hadn't been enough blood to do the test, and I had to go to the hospital IMMEDIATELY to get the baby's blood tested. He kept using words like "crucial" and "critical" and "right now." It was two hours before Shabbos, and I sort of lost it. The baby was sweet and beautiful, but I'd taken to calling him Barracuda Boy, and those of you who have nursed an enthusiastic newborn will understand the kind of pain that can cause. I'd installed seven car seats in the last week. Everything ached, and I was tired, and I had to find a ride to the hospital. I sort of lost it.

(This is taking an awfully long time to write...)

Right, well, so, we got to the hospital, and they tested the baby's blood, and his bilirubin was so high they didn't believe it and tested it again, and it was right, and they admitted him. And the doctor came in and started talking about things like IVs and blood transfusions and the NICU and brain damage (which B"H he does not have, and none of which he needed, B"H a million times.) And there I was erev Shabbos, frantic about the baby, in a shirt soaked in breastmilk (this is what happens when you have a five-day-old baby), with no food, no extra clothes, no nothing.

But we had Grandma E.

My husband says I have three categories of friends: Jews, Asians, and people at least forty years older than I am. He's pretty much right. Grandma E is in the last category, a friend from my spinning guild who came to stay with us when Barak was born. I can't get too effusive about how great and amazing she is, because she's sitting behind me reading a book and will get embarassed if I do, but she's a tzedaikus. She had come to the hospital with us when the baby needed to get his blood drawn (being a retired RN who used to work at the very hospital where I'd had the baby and where we ended up spending Shabbos), and when it was clear he was going to be admitted she went back home with the friend who gave us a ride and packed up a change of clothes for me, and knitting for after Shabbos, and food. (She isn't Jewish, so she could do this even though it was past licht.) And then she came back and spent Shabbos with us in the hospital without even a change of clothes for herself, and turned what would have been a total nightmare into a scary but otherwise sort of pleasant Shabbos of sitting around chatting and watching the baby and debating whether or not he looked a little less yellow.The pediatric ward was almost empty, so they put us in a triple, and it could have been an awful lot worse.

So we spent Shabbos in the hospital, and the baby got to bask under the bililights in his very own baby tanning bed. I thought it would be awful and he'd scream and cry and I wouldn't be able to comfort him, but actually it was okay. He fussed a little and then thought, hmm, this isn't so bad after all--nice and warm actually. And after a few minutes, he stretched out and went right to sleep.

And his bilirubin went down, and down, and the baby started fussing, which was a good sign, and wanting to nurse more and more, which was an even better sign. Grandma E went home, and I talked to MHH on the phone, and he was coming to see the baby. And things were okay. And I felt so much better. And there I was sitting in a rocking chair, nursing the baby, feeling so grateful for everything I had.

And then my cellphone rang.