Day 6

Thursday-- Day 1 of countdown

I woke up feeling a little better about life and headed into the NICU. This is how she was...

Her Jaundice levels were high so they had her under the lights. She seemed to enjoy them and was sprawled out pretty contently. The hard things about bili lights is you can't hold your baby. The only time she was allowed out was when I was nursing. She got 30 minutes every 4 hours to nurse and then had to be back under the lights. It was so hard to not be able to hold her and love her. But I took comfort in the fact that we had 1 day down and only 5 more to go. My mom and grandma came and spent a few hours with us and we went out and played at the park with the kids for a couple hours later that day. It was good to get out of the hospital and see our kids. I was starting to rebuild my spirits and felt okay about the 5 days we had left. Addison hadn't had anything scary that made us worry and her sleep apnea (that is what they admitted her for) seemed to be gone. She was breathing enough to keep her oxygen levels up. She was also eating better. She was nursing fairly well ( which is surprising for a 35 week baby) and she was eating great out of a bottle she had a few feeding she ate close to 2 ounces.

About 8:30 that night I sent Chris into the NICU to take in some milk I had pumped. We were going to go grab some food so I waited outside the doors for him to come back. It took him a really long time to drop the milk off and I started to get a knot in my stomach... something had to be wrong. Just as I was about to go in and see what was going on I saw Chris coming out and the look on his face was all I needed to see to know things weren't right. He took 2 steps out the door looked at me and said "Addison crashed". I instantly couldn't breath, he kept talking but I didn't hear anything he said. I heard enough to know that she had recovered with just a simple re-positioning of her body ( she was on her side and they turned her to her back) but that was all it took to restart her countdown clock. The 2 days we had made it were all for naught and we were now back to day 0.

Chris guided me back to the room where I came apart. I felt broken, and lost, and alone. I didn't have the strength to start all over. I needed my baby, I needed to hold her. It was a bad couple of hours before Chris calmed me down enough to finally get some sleep.... notice the pattern here? I fall apart daily and Chris is always the strong one who reminds me of all of our blessings and talks me back of the cliff?

Day 6 ended with bad news, and lots and lots of doubts and tears.