LJ Idol Three Strikes: Prompt 6 — Pursuit

[flipflop_diva]

With a second baby, I had certain expectations. We’d go to the hospital for his birth, we’d stay a day or two, or maybe three if he had jaundice like his sister did, and then we would go home.

But I should have known that things aren’t always how I plan.

Our second — and last — child came into this world on July 3, 2021, at 9:11 at night via a planned c-section. Not a scheduled one, since he was supposed to have waited two more weeks until our actual scheduled time.

But baby boy had his own idea of when he wanted to be born.

Everything started out fine. Seemingly. I laid on the operating table as the doctor did her thing, feeling only the odd tug or pinch thanks to the drugs coursing through my system. I listened to the doctor issuing commands here and there, and then heard those magic words.

“He’s out.”

For the next few seconds, I waited in agony until, what felt like an eternity later, there, the sweet, sweet sound of a newborn baby’s cry.

Relief and happiness washed through me.

When my daughter had been born three years before, I’d had to wait a few minutes for the nurses to clean her up and measure her before they brought her to me. I knew it would be the same now with Riker.

Time ticked on. I stared up at the tiled ceiling, listening to the sounds of the doctor and nurses, feeling tugs as they worked.

David was called over to see the baby.

I waited more.

And then a nurse appeared. But unlike three years before, she wasn’t holding a baby, and she wasn’t a nurse. She introduced herself as the on-call doctor from the NICU.

“Your son’s having trouble breathing,” she said. “He’s having a hard time taking air in like he should. We’re going to take him to the NICU. You can see him in a couple hours once you’re feeling up to it.”

I remember nodding at that, saying “Okay,” even as my brain tried to make sense of what she was saying.

I had heard him cry; he sounded fine.

I laid there more after that, trying not to worry about my baby but also only worrying about my baby.

And then the doctor was back.

“We’re not going to need to take him to the NICU after all. He peed on himself before we could get a diaper on, and it startled him so much, it fixed his breathing.” She smiled at that as she continued. “He’s doing just fine now.”

She said they were going to take him to my room, that I could see him as soon as the doctor finished stitching me up.

I told her thank you, relieved that was the end of it.

Little did anyone know, it was really just the beginning.

—

We didn’t know anything was wrong at first. No one did. Riker stayed in our hospital room with us. He passed all his checkups. The only challenge was feeding him. He didn’t want to breastfeed, just wanted to take a few sips and lay his head against me, but not all babies take to breastfeeding.

On Sunday evening, about 24 hours after he was born, they tested him for jaundice. His results came back borderline but leaning toward slightly elevated.

His sister had jaundice when she was born, three years before, so we already knew we wanted to take no chances. We agreed to put Riker under the bili lights and stay another night.

Besides the jaundice, there was nothing else to worry about. He still wasn’t getting enough food, but the nurses and the lactation consultants chalked that up to just regular newborn tiredness. The nurse brought in formula for him and a pump for me. He took to the bottle much better.

On Monday, about twenty-four after he went under the lights and forty-eight hours after he was born, the nurses took Riker for another blood draw. A few hours later, when the results came back, they told us his jaundice levels were looking good and we should be discharged in the morning.

“You’re going to get to meet your sister soon,” I told Riker.

A few hours after that, when morning dawned, David headed out. He was going to go home to feed the dog and take a shower and then pick Ellie, our daughter, up from where she had been staying with my sister ever since my water broke. He would take Ellie to daycare and then be back to take Riker and me home from the hospital.

I took the opportunity to try and catch a last few fleeting minutes of sleep before we headed home with a newborn and settled into life as a family of four.

Or so I thought.

An hour or so after David left, Riker let out a cry, letting me know he was hungry. I picked him up and once more attempted an unsuccessful breastfeeding. I was getting out the formula to feed him when the nurse came in to do her checkup. She took Riker’s temperature and frowned.

“It’s a little low,” she said. “Has he been bundled up this whole time?”

Instantly, a flood of guilt filled me.

“No,” I said sheepishly. “I had him against me when I was trying to feed him, but he wasn’t wrapped super well.”

“Okay,” she said. “Well, let’s wrap him up, and then I’ll check him again in a little bit.”

She headed back out, and I returned to feeding my son.

An hour later, the nurse returned. She checked Riker and took his temperature, and again she frowned.

“It’s still really low,” she said. “Let me go see if I can get a heater for him.”

“Okay,” I said, not worried at all. When Ellie had been born, her temperature had been low too and they had put her on a heater in our room for a couple hours and then she had been good to go.

The nurse headed out, and I picked up my phone while I waited.

A little bit later she returned.

“There aren’t any heaters available right now,” she said. “So I’m going to take him down to the NICU to use the heater there. Then in a couple hours, he should be good, and you can be discharged.”

“Great,” I said.

I watched as she made sure Riker was all bundled up and then wheeled him out of the room in his little mobile bed. It was weird to be alone in the hospital room, no husband and no baby. I turned on the television to find something to watch while I waited.

Time passed, and then a knock came on my door. I expected it to be the nurse, but it was a doctor who looked vaguely familiar. She introduced herself as the head doctor of the NICU, and I realized she was the same doctor who was there when he was born, the one who told me he was having trouble breathing.

“We have your son on the heater,” she said. “It’s NICU policy that babies need to be in the hospital for twelve hours afterward so they can be evaluated. Unfortunately, that means he won’t be able to be discharged until tomorrow.”

My heart dropped. So much for going home today, for letting Riker meet Ellie.

“Okay,” I said, because what else was there to say?

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said.

I picked up the phone after she left so I could tell David the news. He didn’t answer so I left him a voicemail, then I went back to watching television.

A bit later another knock came on my door. Again, the NICU doctor appeared.

“We did an evaluation of your son,” she told me. “His temperature was low, as you know. But his blood sugar is also very low and so is his oxygen saturation. We’ve put him on oxygen and admitted him to the NICU. He’ll have to be there at least twenty-four hours. You can come see him when you feel up to it.”

My head spun. Tears filled my eyes. My baby boy, in the NICU, all these things wrong with him? But he had been fine just a few hours ago.

Hadn’t he?

--

I never thought I would walk down the hospital hallways to the NICU, but there I was, next to David, a little while after Riker had been admitted. One of the delivery nurses showed us the way — how to get to the big intimidating automatic doors, how to press the red button to be let in, how to scrub our hands to make sure we didn’t pass any germs on to any of the babies.

We found another doctor — Dr. Lucke — and a couple of the NICU nurses with Riker. He looked so tiny, wrapped in a blanket and lying on the little bed, a cannula in his nose and tubes connected to his feet and his chest and his legs.

“We’re not sure what’s wrong with him,” Dr. Lucke told us, “But we’re trying to bring his stats up.”

She went on to explain everything, to show us exactly what tube did what and what each reading on the monitors meant. She showed us how we could pick him up and how we should hold him so not to get in the way of all the tubes.

And she told us, repeatedly, that they were going to do what they could to figure out what was wrong with him.

“Hopefully in a day or two, he’ll be good to go home,” she said, and we smiled.

“That sounds great,” I said.

That first day, Riker’s blood sugar went back to normal levels. So did his temperature. But his oxygen saturation levels were a different story. They kept dropping, even with the oxygen. Down to the low 80s when they needed to be at least in the 90s.

The doctors increased the oxygen he was getting, explaining to us that he wouldn’t be able to go home until his stats could stay at least at 94 percent for twenty-four hours without the oxygen, but they hoped that increasing the oxygen now would help him, and then they could wean him off.

At the same time, they started with the tests. So many tests on such a little baby. They pricked his feet and drew blood, over and over and over. They took scans of every part of his body — his lungs, his heart, his brain.

Everything came back normal, nothing to explain why his oxygen saturation kept dropping, but dropping it kept doing. Every time they tried to decrease the oxygen or take him off it, down it would go. Sometimes when we were feeding him or holding him, it would drop, setting off the alarms.

We learned how to stop the alarms from blaring, how to position him to get his levels to go back up. But nothing anyone tried seemed to be able to stop his levels from actually dropping.

Dr. Lucke consulted with her colleagues at Dell Children’s Hospital in downtown Austin. They said maybe it was because he was so little — he was only 5 pounds when he was born and he had come three weeks early. They said sometimes babies just need a little extra time to figure out how to breathe properly. They said maybe it would get better on its own.

The days ticked by, but it didn’t get better on its own. The doctors at Dell contemplated doing some tests for more chronic and genetic conditions. But the tests weren’t something that could be done at the hospital we were at.

Nine days after Riker was admitted to the NICU, he was bundled up and placed in a portable incubator and transferred by ambulance thirty miles down the road to Dell Children’s Hospital. I watched them take my baby away, tears streaming down my face, wondering when this would be over, when we would finally get to take our baby home, if we would get to take our baby home.

At that moment, it seemed so hopeless and so endless. I just wanted answers.

--

Being at Dell was both better and worse. It’s one of the best children’s hospitals in the nation. There wasn’t a better place he could be to get the care he needed. But it was a lot further away.

At the hospital he was born in, when he got moved to the NICU, they gave me a room I could stay in, even though I got discharged. I had a bed and even got meal service.

At Dell, there weren’t any of those options. Instead, we made the 45-minute drive every morning after we took Ellie to daycare and left each day when it was time to pick her up. It did mean we went home to Ellie, but leaving our little boy each day tore at my heart.

The doctors at Dell didn’t have answers either. They ran more tests, took more blood, tried taking him off the oxygen to see if there would be a difference, but nothing was better and nothing was worse.

The head pulmonologist wondered if maybe he had congenital central hypoventilation syndrome (CCHS), a rare disorder that causes a lot of the symptoms Riker had but which would mean he would probably need to be on oxygen for the rest of his life.

There was a test Riker could take that would confirm, but before we did that, the pulmonologist suggested we do a sleep study, and we agreed, terrified that our baby had a disease that was going to severely impact his life.

More days went by, more trips back and forth, more waiting, more worrying. Finally, after being at Dell’s for six days, Riker was able to get his sleep study. It happened at night, so we couldn’t stay, but we kissed him goodbye before we left and told him we loved him and that we hoped we’d find answers so we could finally take him home with us.

The next morning, when we arrived at the hospital, the doctors told us he was a champ for his sleep study. They said he did so good despite all the wires they had to put on him. They also said we’d get the results in twenty-four to forty-eight hours.

Two days later, the head doctor on Riker’s case came back, results in hand.

“He has severe obstructive sleep apnea,” he told us. “It’s very unusual to find in babies.”

He went on to tell us that our poor little boy had an average of 33 episodes of apnea in every one-hour period, with his oxygen levels plummeting a few times an hour. But, he also said, that since the best way to treat it was with oxygen and time, we could finally take our little boy home.

It took a couple more days to actually get to leave the hospital — we had to make Riker what seemed like a million appointments with various doctors who would be monitoring his care, we had to learn how to use the oxygen machines (the portable and non-portable ones) and how to take care of a baby on oxygen, and we had to pass a CPR class. Riker had to pass a car seat test, proving he could sit in his car seat for an hour, on his oxygen, without his levels dropping.

Finally, we had to spend the night in one of the practice rooms (set up like a hotel but with a NICU-type bed for a baby) to make sure we could take care of all his needs on our own, without help from the nurses and the doctors.

Then, the next morning, on July 24, three weeks after Riker was born, David, Riker, Riker’s oxygen and I all got into the car and drove home to Ellie, who had spent the night with her grandmother, so we could finally all be together.

There was a long road ahead of us, we knew that. We never expected that our baby would need so much help. But the most important obstacle was finally overcome — we had a diagnosis, and with the diagnosis came a plan and a path forward.

It was a start, but right then, it was all that we needed.




Non-fiction.



Riker at birth.


Riker in the NICU.


Riker ready for his ambulance ride.


Riker today (or, last week, rather). 9 months old.






This was written for therealljidol Three Strikes Mini Season. If you liked my entry, please consider voting for me! You should also go read all the other amazing entries. You can find them all here. Voting should be up Thursday night!

Comments

[erulissedances]

OMG, what an ordeal for all of you, and such a cute baby! I'm praying that things get better and better for all of you as he matures, but I'm so glad you at least have him with you at last.

- Erulisse (one L)

[roina_arwen]

Such a scary story! I’m glad it wasn’t anything worse - is Riker still on oxygen? He’s adorable!

[adoptedwriter]

Oh my! So cute! Still what a scare! Glad he is ok now.

[pianogurl330]

Oh my! *hugs* For that whole ordeal! I am so glad to read he's doing better now! He is adorable!

[mollywheezy]

That had to be so scary for y'all!!! Does Riker still need the oxygen? HE certainly is a cute little guy. :)

[ofearthandstars]

What a cutie he is now! My oldest was 5 weeks early and 4 lbs, 6 oz at birth. It was terrifying, but they can be tough little dudes. I'm glad they figured out the issue and hope that it's corrected over time. ❤️

[banana_galaxy]

Poor little guy. Gosh, this sounds like it would've been heartbreaking to experience, but I'm glad you finally got answers and were able to take him home.

[troof_therry]

What a sweet looking little guy. My partner went through hell at the NICU with both of their children, so reading this was pretty terrifying from start to finish. I'm glad he's with you still and at home.

[dadi]

Oh dear, that was a goosebump-raising story... I am so so sorry you all had to go through it! But he looks fabulous now, I am so glad you got a diagnosis and a path to follow!

[dsrmousey]

He is so beautiful! And am glad he's doing better! How afraid you must have been. Riker looks very happy and content mama! Am so happy for you. Peace and blessings ~~~D

[gunwithoutmusic]

Oh my gosh, I love when you post stories about Riker because I get to see him and he is just so stinkin cute! :) I can't believe he's already almost a year old.

What an ordeal that was! But I'm glad that the doctors got it figured out and that you finally got to take him home.

[alycewilson]

What an adorable little guy! I'm glad he got all the care that he needed to diagnose and treat his issue.

(I'm going back and commenting on some of my favorites from last week before starting to read this week's entries.)