In no way do I want to come across as being critical of the good folks at Early Start or Healthlink when I make this post. I think it's a great resource for parents of new baby's and young children, and they've been a great help to us with both of our daughters. I just have a couple of stories from the past week that I thought would be funny to look back on.
I guess the first one isn't all that funny, and we definately had some legitimate concerns with Ashley's health that we wanted resolved, but it's a good example of finding something out the hard way.
We found some blood in Ashley's diaper the day after we brought her home. It wasn't a poopy diaper, just "void" and a bit of blood, so we called the Healthlink people to find out if it was something we should be worried about. The nurse on the line asked if Ashley was experiencing any other symptoms from a list they had there, and in minor ways, it appeared that she was. The most concerning one was that she seemed to feel pain when I would gently touch her tummy below her belly button. That, coupled with the blood in her diaper, were reasons enough for the nurse to suggest that we take her to the emergency room at the Children's Hospital. We did, and my parents met us there to watch Emma for us.
The long and the short of it is, after a five hour wait (which seems really long when you've had almost no sleep for days) the Doctor's told us that everything was completely normal. I guess the blood in the diaper is caused by the hormones that are transferred from Mom through the placenta and during nursing, which trigger a false menstruation in baby girls. It's normal during the first week of the baby's life, although not all baby girls experience it, including any baby girls I've ever known. The tummy pain turned out to be gas, and completely unrelated to the blood in the diaper, so we were sent home happy to have a healthy baby, yet a little discouraged about the potential sleep we might have gotten, had we been a little more educated.
The next night, as I was holding Ashley, I noticed that she was breathing really rapidly as she slept, and had done so several times since birth. I decided to time her breaths per minute, and she consistantly hit near or above the 70 mark, which seemed a little high to me. I called the Healthlink people again, just to find out what the normal breathing rate was for newborns, and it turns out that my suspicions were correct, it was a bit high. I had taken her temperature before I called, and it was fine, and she didn't seem distressed in any way, so I had no real concerns other than that she had had brief exposure to my Dad, who had been suffering from what he thought at the time was pneumonia, and I wanted to be sure that this wasn't the early signs of a serious lung problem.
Well before I knew it, the nurse on the line had called the paramedics, and a few short minutes later we had a fire truck and an ambulance parked outside and a living room full of 3 fire fighters, 2 EMS technicians, and 1 perfectly healthy baby. It turns out that rapid breathing is also normal as babies get used to actually breathing air during their first few weeks of life. The EMS technicians checked her out and offered several times to take us to the Hospital if we still felt concerned, but we were never all that concerned in the first place, so we declined and sent them on their way. Another late night.
Again, I want to say that I think Healthlink is a great service to have, and I'm glad that there are people who stand by and are trained to help keep our babies alive and well. I just feel like a paranoid parent everytime emergency staff get involved and it turns out to be something minor like gas, or hiccups, or infant periods. When it comes to your own children though, it's always better to be safe than sorry.
No comments:
Post a Comment