60.5%

Well - at the time of this posting, little Ethan will have spent 60.5% of his short life in hospitals. Sad, but true. When we were sent home with him on the 28th, he had a bit of a high bilirubin count, so they wanted us to have him checked out the next day. [I'm not a big medical guru, and even though this has been explained to me several times, I'm still a little fuzzy: Bilirubin is basically the extra red blood cells newborns have that haven't broken down and exited his system properly. This is what causes Jaunice.] So we took him in to get poked and prodded, and learned that his count was even higher - at 17. In normal adults it sits around .5, but it's always a little higher in babies because they haven't had time to get things worked out. However, brain damage can occur if the count gets to 25. So, they re-admitted him to the hospital's Intensive Care Nursery. This is not what we had planned for the day, and it was a little hard on me to see him hooked up to all the wires and iv's and everything. [I need to qualify that the only reason he was in the ICN was because that was the only bed available... not because he was really that bad. So I did feel a little guilty sitting there crying while he cried as we were surrounded by so many other babies that were fighting just to stay alive.]

So, they decided the real reason he was having these problems was because he wasn't getting enough food so he wasn't producing enough waste to carry out the bilis. However, he wasn't eating enough because he wasn't ever waking up. He wasn't waking up because his bili count was so high. His bili count was so high because he wasn't eating enough... you get the picture. So we tried our best to force him to eat every 3 hours, and it was just a struggle for everyone involved.

We stayed the night at the hospital, which was really nice - all things considered. They have a few Ronald McDonald rooms that families of sick kids can stay in, so we got one of those for the night, and since I was breastfeeding, I got meal vouchers for the cafeteria. Which really helped us relax at least a little bit....We were still waking ourselves up every 3 hours, and by the time we walked up to his room, "scrubbed in" [doctor-style] to the ICN, fed him, and walked back, we were only getting 1 to 1-1/2 hours of sleep at a time. Luckily, the cafeteria was open basically 24 hours so we didn't have to deal with hunger, too.

After the first night in the ICN, they took his iv drip out, and did more tests. His count was down to 10.7. YAY! But they wanted to keep an eye on him because he was still really dehydrated, not eliminating enough, and we didn't know what would happen without the extra fluids. So, we stayed another day. By the end of the day, his count was up again to 11.4, but this was somewhat expected because of the drop in fluid intake. So we stayed the night again. This time, the doctors were feeling much better about things, and were seeing some progress, so we were able to stay in the Parent Care Unit in the hospital. Basically, it's a room in the ICN with a double bed (a step up from the twin the previous night) and his crib. He wasn't hooked up to anything, and the nurses were available to us if we needed them. They're mostly used for transition phases before taking babies home. It was great to just be the 3 of us without all the monitors and people and sort of get a feeding schedule worked out - instead of waking him up every 3 hours for a mediocre feeding, we would let him wake us up but not let him go longer than 4 hours. We also supplemented a little bit of formula after each feeding to make sure he was good and full.

They checked his bili again, and it was up to 13. This, for some reason wasn't as big of an issue with the doctors, so we were able to take him home with an appointment for another bili check the next day - Friday. It was so nice to finally have him home with us, and the stress level went way down. Talk about a crazy few days - our first outing with him was to the clinic, we were running late, and didn't exactly pack for a 3 day hospital stay, so we felt totally unprepared. Having him home really helped, and at his follow-up yesterday, his count had gone down to 12. So, we're free and clear and on the road to full recovery. They're guessing it will take a few weeks to get everything worked out, but the scare is gone and now we can just get to know our little guy and learn and grow with him. What a blessing!