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Welcome Home We arrived home by 10:30 in the morning on Etta’s fourth day of life, six days after I had first entered the hospital. There were no crowds to greet us on the doorstep, unless you count our three cats. Etta’s release had been so sudden that we left the hospital immediately, fearing another pediatrician might revoke the discharge orders. My husband got us settled and then had to return to his office nearby to finish up the final touches on a presentation he had to give the next day. Because Etta was two weeks late, the paternity leave my husband had planned for had come and gone. When my husband left I realized that for the first time, I was truly alone with this delicate little person who was my daughter. She wasn’t anything like the robust baby I was expecting, and if I hadn’t seen her emerge from my own body during the delivery I wouldn’t have believed that she was related to me. For the next few hours I held Etta, examining her in the natural light that spilled through the nursery window. She weighed a mere six pounds, seven ounces and seemed just skin and bones. Her jaw line was distinctly visible, her fingers like spider legs, her skin dry and peeling, and her little pelvis so small that she required preemie-sized diapers despite being full-term. Although I had been loving her since the moment I discovered that I was pregnant, and I’d been caring for her devotedly the last few days in the hospital, this was the moment that I fell in love with who she really was, and not what I thought she would be. My fourteen year old stepdaughter arrived home from school and met her sister for the first time. Her reaction: "That’s my little sister? She doesn’t even look human. She looks like an alien or something." Home Phototherapy A home health nurse arrived in the afternoon to set Etta up on phototherapy. The "Wallaby" machine had a rigid band attached by a fiber-optic tube to a noisy machine generating blue light. Etta had to wear the band around her torso at all times, and it was quite awkward having her tethered by a short, stiff link to a heavy machine. The band either rode up under Etta’s armpits, pushing her little shoulders up to her ears, or it pushed down on her diaper, rubbing the umbilical stump. I put the machine on top of a box in a baby carriage so that I could easily wheel Etta and her apparatus from the crib across the room to the rocking recliner for nursing. It was impossible for Etta to wear clothes while receiving the therapy, so I took her out of her darling layette gown and kept her in just a diaper and cap, bundling her in receiving blankets. We also had a heater in the nursery to keep the room about 80 degrees, as Etta couldn’t regulate her temperature well because she had such little fat. The home care nurse came daily to examine Etta. Etta’s bili level shot up so the next day the nurse brought a "Bilibed" light bed to replace the Wallaby machine. The Bilibed was much stronger, and was what was used in the hospital. There was a disadvantage to the Bilibed, though, and that was that I couldn’t hold Etta as much as I wanted to because she had to be lying on it to receive the therapy. I needed to be as efficient as possible when I took her out for a diaper change and nursing. "No extra time cuddling," the nurse warned. So as I had done in the hospital, I stood beside Etta’s bed and talked to her while stroking her tiny body. First night home I slept in a twin bed beside the crib in the nursery. At one point in the night I noticed my feet felt strange. When I turned on the light I was horrified to see that my ankles and feet were hugely swollen. My toes looked like plump little sausages, and the arches under my feet had nearly disappeared from the swelling. I vaguely remembered mention in one of the childbirth books that this was normal, but I was still alarmed enough by the sight of it to call the 24-hour nursing line at 3:00am to get reassurance. Etta woke and took the breast about every two hours, much more frequently than on the Special Care Nursery schedule. I quickly got into a routine: Etta stirred, I waited a few moments to see if she’d fall back asleep (wishful thinking -- she never did), I picked her up, changed her diaper, put her down, went to the bathroom to change my pad, used the toilet, washed my hands, went downstairs to refill my water bottle, went back upstairs to bring Etta from the crib to the rocking recliner, nursed while I drank my water, watched the clock to time the nursing, rocked Etta until she fell asleep, put her back in the crib, recorded the contents of her diaper and the length of her feeding on the chart, and crawled back into bed myself. This all took about 45 minutes to an hour. First Visitors The weekend came, and so did friends and family. Because Etta had to be in the nursery on the phototherapy machine, I didn’t have to worry about her being passed around. Most visitors took a peek at her, sensed that we were coping with a sickly baby, and made a quick departure. My husband’s brother stayed with us the first night home because my husband had to be away on a business trip! He was a wonderful help, doing dishes, fielding phone calls, and fetching things for me. My mother, or "Grammy" as she was now called, helped us by running errands. I gave her a list of all the things I had neglected to have on hand: extra nursing pads, a baby monitor, newborn size disposable diapers (the cloth diapers we’d ordered were enormous and too big to use yet), a few more nursing bras now that I knew my size, and more menstrual pads. My husband was relieved that he didn’t have to do such shopping, although he would have if I’d asked him to. Breastfeeding is established We got off to a difficult start with Etta in the Special Care Nursery, but now I was finally getting comfortable with breastfeeding. The first few days my nipples were bloody and sore, mostly due to the pumping I’d had to do. In comparison to the pump, having Etta at my breast was much less painful. Etta was still quite weak and required help latching, but once she was on she knew what to do and didn’t want to be disturbed until she’d finished! |
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