{"id":399,"date":"2010-01-26T22:04:09","date_gmt":"2010-01-27T04:04:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thekurths.com\/?p=399"},"modified":"2010-01-26T22:04:09","modified_gmt":"2010-01-27T04:04:09","slug":"your-love-is-like-a-roller-coaster-baby","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thekurths.com\/blog\/2010\/01\/26\/your-love-is-like-a-roller-coaster-baby\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Love is Like a Roller Coaster Baby"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>Let’s begin the story with the end: Everything is fine.<\/p>\n

And now, for the recounting of the most terrifying day of our lives as parents.\u00a0 In the wee hours of the morning during our first day at home after being discharged from the hospital with Daniel, we were just getting ready to change a diaper Daniel was working on.\u00a0 Suddenly, Daniel began to sputter and choke and when I looked down at him, he was foaming at the mouth and having trouble breathing.\u00a0 Needless to say, I panicked, picked him up, and grabbed the bulb syringe to suction out his mouth.\u00a0 He still seemed to be having trouble breathing, and the foaming? — a seizure? we wondered.\u00a0 We called 911 and the paramedics were on their way.<\/p>\n

I was terrified.\u00a0 Ever since that scare we had early in the pregnancy with the fluid in his abdomen that mysteriously went away, I’ve felt as though I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop.\u00a0 Could there really be something horribly wrong?\u00a0 Could this be it?<\/p>\n

Four minutes later about a dozen big burly paramedics, firemen, and sherriffs came charging into our house and into our bedroom.\u00a0 (Kaeta and Jonah, by the way, were sound asleep in their bedroom, oblivious to this 3 am intrusion.)\u00a0 By this time, Daniel had stopped foaming and could breathe just fine.\u00a0 The paramedic who checked him out said his vitals were perfect, he was showing no signs of distress, his oxygen level was great, and he looked like a perfectly healthy 2-day-old baby.\u00a0 And these were not the symptoms of someone coming out of a seizure.\u00a0 He said we could take him to the hospital if we wanted to, or we could just follow up with our pediatrician at our next visit.\u00a0 Big sigh of relief.\u00a0 Now maybe we could get some sleep!<\/p>\n

Nope.\u00a0 Two hours later, after nursing the baby and trying to get back to sleep, Daniel spits up.\u00a0 Blood.\u00a0 Trying not to panic this time, we called the after-hours nurse.\u00a0 She says we better take him to the emergency room.\u00a0 It’s possible that he could have a tear in his intestine.\u00a0 Thump.\u00a0 The other shoe.\u00a0 So now I’m back to panicking.<\/p>\n

Having just come home<\/em> from the hospital, we still had a lot of stuff packed, so we quickly loaded it back in the car.\u00a0 Maintaining the speed limit (really!), we drove back to Seton, since we had just been discharged from there.\u00a0 But apparently that was wrong.\u00a0 Once they’d admitted us and checked him over, they said we’d need to transfer to Dell Children’s Hospital.\u00a0 They loaded Daniel in an ambulance<\/em>, and I rode with him while Derek drove our car to Dell.\u00a0 (And to complicate matters, it was the day of a half-marathon, so Derek had to drive way out of the way to avoid the race route!\u00a0 But it worked out fine.)<\/p>\n

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At Dell, we answered the same dozen questions over and over (what happened? how much blood?\u00a0 breast or bottle?) and eventually they decided to (1) x-ray his abdomen and (2) put a tube down his throat into his stomach to examine the contents.\u00a0 Believe it or not, he objected much<\/em> more strongly to the x-ray (I guess the table was cold).\u00a0 The tube down the throat didn’t seem to bother him that much.\u00a0 Not nearly as much as it bothered us!<\/p>\n

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Not finding more fresh blood in his stomach was a good sign (it meant he wasn’t actively bleeding), and the x-rays looked good too.\u00a0 It took a while to check everything out, but the doctor and nurses were great, and they discharges us around 11:30.\u00a0 The doctor’s theory is that Daniel must have been choking on some mucus or something in the back of his throat, which would explain the foaming.\u00a0 Then in our panic to suction out his mouth right away, we might have scratched the back of his throat (apparently an easy thing to do), causing it to bleed and drain into his tummy, which would explain the spitting up blood.\u00a0 A plausible explanation, but nonetheless terrifying to witness!<\/p>\n

Derek’s theory is that Daniel just wanted to ride in an ambulance.\u00a0 When the foaming at the mouth and consequent 911 call didn’t work, he had to go to Plan B: spitting up blood.\u00a0 But one way or another, he was determined to ride in an ambulance.\u00a0 I don’t want to know what Plan C might have been.<\/p>\n

So, that was a looong 9 hours of insanity!\u00a0 Our goal the next night was: “No trips to the hospital,” and we’ve now pulled that off 2 nights in a row.
\nDaniel went to the pediatrician yesterday and is doing just fine.\u00a0 He is almost back up to his birth weight.\u00a0 He is the picture of perfect health for a newborn, despite all his efforts to scare us half to death.\u00a0 Our prediction: he’s going to love roller coasters when he gets bigger.<\/p>\n

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Let’s begin the story with the end: Everything is fine. And now, for the recounting of the most terrifying day of our lives as parents.\u00a0 In the wee hours of the morning during our first day at home after being discharged from the hospital with Daniel, we were just getting ready to change a diaper […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thekurths.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thekurths.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thekurths.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thekurths.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thekurths.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thekurths.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thekurths.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thekurths.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thekurths.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}