Saturday, January 09, 2010

My "alien baby"

On the day that we discharged from hospital, Kayla did a blood test for jaundice and the results were too high for her to be discharged - 10.8.

Luckily, I had seen from Yvonne's Facebook that there's a phototherapy machine that can be rented home to use on the baby. So we immediately made arrangements at the PD's clinic to rent the machine home. It cost $430+ for 3 days' 2 nights' rental. I thought it made good sense as the baby's hospitalisation bill would even be higher than that.

It was quite a distressing experience for both baby and I. Once we put Kayla in, she would wail at the top of her voice. Firstly, she doesn't fancy being unswaddled. On top of that, we had to remove her clothes. We were told by the staff that babies would definitely cry when placed inside and we just had to turn a blind eye and deaf ear to it. Anyway, if they had been in the hospital nursery, they would also be crying, just that we wouldn't be there to hear and see it. I kept psychoing myself with that thought but it still is heartbreaking to hear the little one in such distress.

After the second day, we learnt that she could sleep long and well after a good meal. So we made sure that she was fed some formula (to supplement while waiting for my milk to come in) and was full and fast asleep before we placed her inside the "capsule".


We also made a startling discovery about Kayla when we placed her on her tummy. She could actually lift up her head and turn to the opposite side. And she was only 4 days old then! On day 6, she was propping her butt up in the air and trying to shuffle her body forward! Way to go, gal!



By the way, don't you think Kayla looks like an "alien baby" when she's wearing the eye mask? Haha.


It wasn't until Day 7 (after 2 visits to the PD and 2 blood tests) that Kayla's jaundice level was declared safe to be taken off the phototherapy.

1 comment:

Riniki said...

Aww. She's really brave.:)