The next week
The next day Zach wheeled me back to the NICU. I got to hold Rowan again. This time is when everything hit me. I sat there holding him and crying. Zach may have also teared up a little.
At first he was receiving donor milk. Slowly but surely I was able to pump tiny bits of colostrum for him.
At some point in the first few days his bilirubin went up, and he had to be on the phototheraphy lights. Honestly I would have been way more surprised if he hadn’t had to be. He looked cool in his shades. He also spit up a few times, and it was greenish. So they did an x-ray, which looked fine. He had a few more “bilious aspirates” over the next few days. They felt like everything was probably just fine, and he was just digesting very slowly due to my having been on magnesium. But they wanted to rule out any bigger issues, so they did a GI study where they put dye in his feeding tube. The results were normal. So they resumed feeds, but slowly. They also decided to put a PICC line in. But they had trouble getting one placed. In the meantime he started doing better with digestion, so they ultimately decided not to place the PICC, which was certainly nice to hear!
Babies lose weight after they are born. And when you are born at 3 pounds 3 ounces, it breaks your mommy’s heart to think about you weighing even less. By May 4th he was finally back up to three pounds!
On May 5th we got to try what they call “lick and learn” (which we all agree is just a terrible name). Basically it is putting baby to an empty breast. Mine weren’t particularly empty, but at that point I wasn’t really leaking, either. He definitely managed to latch on a few times. It was so nice after a week of nothing but the pump.
