The Week After

This blog is meant, in part, to journal for my family. (It's also supposed to be informative, amusing and bombastic in turns but today it's a journal.) So here's what happened after the very dramatic entrance of CJ.

We stayed in the hospital for the better part of a week. My older kids got passed around quite a bit so Husband could work and save his paid time off for when I'd REALLY need help.

The recovery has been wickedly hard. Harder than an surgery I've had. I'm sure the two liters of blood loss didn't help. (Yes, two liters like a 2L soda pop bottle, two liters. It's a lot.)

We were ready to go home by Sunday afternoon, though. CJ had already regained her birth weight, or come awfully close, I can't remember now. That night we went to family dinner like usual, only this time, there were FIVE of us!

When we got home I noticed CJ's eye was pretty swollen. We called the nurse hotline and decided to watch it. At the 3am feed n' diaper change, it had gotten red and was leaking goopy goo.

Monday morning Husband dropped CJ and I at the doctors without an appointment (something they don't really love but what were they going to do?) and then he took the older kids to his sister-in-law's house for the day.
The doctor was pretty concerned, what with her only being 5 days old and all. He gave us a prescription and told us to come back that afternoon to have it looked at again.

So we went to Costco Pharmacy. I should have waited in the car but instead I wandered around the store with my new baby. When we went back to the doctor, he didn't think her eye was enough improved to watch at home over night so he sent us the children's hospital were CJ was admitted to the NICU for monitoring and IV antibiotics. She got two kinds of IV antibiotics and a topical antibiotic every few hours. The fear was that her eye would turn from periorbital cellulitis into orbital cellulitis or meningitis. We spent two days in NICU (which ended up being overkill of epic proportions) before FINALLY coming home.

My mom had arrived while I was annoying the NICU nurses with requests for discharge papers. She stayed a week and it was LOVELY. I laid around and slept and didn't do my hair and the dishes and laundry still got done and my children were clean and fed and played with. My mom is a marvel and we were so blessed to have her here.

Mom wasn't gone TWO DAYS before The Boy decided that he'd get himself into some powered cement. Now I don't know if you know this about powdered cement, but you really shouldn't put it in your eyes. The Boy wasn't aware of this, or even that it WAS powdered cement. He thought it was sand. Not that you should throw sand either, but my kids still haven't learned that lesson. Two showers and lots of screaming later, his eyes still looked horrid so we called poison control. Yeah. They weren't super thrilled with my kid, either.

After much discussion, we loaded The Boy and my nursling into Kate the Van and I drove to Phoenix Children's ER for evaluation. They washed his eyes out yet again, dyed them a funky orange color and diagnosed him with corneal scratches. Just that took over three hours. Yippee. The Boy was NOT thrilled with the process, even though he got an otter pop and a new toy car out of the deal. I just got another trip to Costco Pharmacy. Frankly, I'm super glad the lye in the cement didn't burn or permanently damage his eyes. Scratches on the cornea we can deal with.

That pretty much catches us up to now. I think everyone is healing or healed. It'll take a few months for me to build back my blood and feel 100%.

CJ has gained one pound one ounce and between one and three inches, depending on whose measurements you believe, since her birth.

I've lost probably close to 30 pounds since the birth and that, my friend, is reason enough for celebration. So I'm going to go break out the chocolate peanut butter ice cream and celebrate.