Jaundice Nightmare...

Poor little Austyn had a rough go with Jaundice unfortunately. Her levels were a little high when we went home from the hospital on the 13th, so we had to go in the next morning to get her blood drawn and levels tested. We got a call that afternoon saying that her levels went up so we had to go get tested again the next day. We went in on Sunday and unfortunately when they called with the results, we got the news that she needed to be on lights because her levels went up once again.... Ugh! We weren't too happy about that, but I was bound and determined to get her off those lights ASAP. 

The dr. told me to keep her on for three hours and then let her off for 30 minutes while I fed her. At this point I was nursing her so I decided that I was going to be strict with this. Unfortunately Austyn wasn't a fan of the lights (but seriously who would be) and SCREAMED while she was on. I literally stayed up all night with her, holding her hand while she SCREAMED. I called the dr. after a while to see if this was normal or if I could take her off to comfort her. I was told to keep her on the lights except to feed. (The dr. was an on-call dr. and not our normal dr. I sure am glad that she isn't our pediatrician).

During the night as Austyn continued to scream, she began spitting up brown curdled milk. I was worried about this and again called the dr. I was told that this is normal and probably had a little blood in her milk from nursing. We went through the whole night and we both got about 30 minutes of sleep. 

Riley had a meeting on Monday morning and when he got back at 9, he could tell that I was EXHAUSTED. He told me to go nap for a bit while he took care of the girls. I had just laid down when Riley began yelling for me. He had a panicked tone to his voice so I ran into our kitchen to see Riley holding our purple baby. 

Luckily Riley is calm in situations like that because I'm not. He was trying to get her to breath while I stood there blubbering. I tried to call our dr. but Riley told me to call 911 (duh). I got on the phone with them and they had someone on their way immediately. Austyn still wasn't breathing, but Riley had me grab the bugger sucker and started sucking the curdled milk out of her throat. After what seemed like forever, she started breathing.

Even though she was breathing, she was still struggling and we knew that something clearly wasn't right. Luckily, the ambulance, firetruck, and about 8 guys showed up. They examined her quickly and decided to take her to the ER because she wasn't recovering like they wanted her to. I rode in the ambulance with Austyn and Riley and Hazyn followed right behind in our car. I could barely keep myself together while riding in the ambulance, but the paramedics were awesome and kept asking me questions about my girls to keep me calm. 

Once we got to the ER, they decided to X-ray her to see what is going on. Long story short, she had apparently aspirated and had to have some gunk sucked out of her nose. We were in the Er all morning making sure she was okay. After that fiasco, we had a previously scheduled appointment with our dr. so we headed over to have him check her out. He was more concerned about her Jaundice than what he thought was a one-time incident. (Which luckily so far has been). Our dr. did suggest that I start pumping to make sure that Austyn got enough to eat so that we could get the bilirubin flushed out and get off the dang lights. 

We finally got home and I began pumping. When I pumped, I couldn't believe how much blood that poor girl was getting in her stomach. It was no wonder it made her tummy upset and she spit it back up. 

I continued to pump for the next week and we continued to struggle with her levels going up. We had to test our blood types because she wasn't breaking down the bili like she should have been. We have different blood types so that is why she couldn't get the jaundice out of her system. We got within .6 of having to put her in the hospital, but luckily on Thursday, a week after she was born, her levels started going down. We unfortunately had to keep her on the lights for a total of 8 days before her levels were low enough for our dr. to take her off. 

All is well now and we can just look back and be thankful that everything turned out alright.