Please Smile For Me Baby

  I came around slowly.  Somehow it all felt as if a nightmare had unfolded in reality and sleep was a good hiding place.  I knew I had a newborn to take care of and so I made myself come out of my haze.  As D gently placed her in my arms, I tried to adjust my eyes to the little face I was looking into.  She was tiny.  My first baby had been 7 pounds and 15 ounces, my second 8 pounds 4 ounces.  This itty bitty little girl was a tiny 6 pounds and 7 ounces.  I had to use premature baby diapers on her and buy premature baby clothes for her to wear.  Her face looked... weird.  Not ugly, not bad, but not right either.  I told myself that I was just too used to looking at her sisters and needed to adjust to a new face.  Her eyes had no sparkle. She seemed just as disoriented and lost as I felt I was.  I blamed the 11 days before her due date and the c-section.  I knew she was off and that was the most sensible reasoning I could determine for it.

My precious newborn E.

  She couldn't eat.  I was not able to breastfeed her because of my bipolar medication so she was offered a bottle right away and she was not able to latch or eat for any amount of time.  We would have to position the bottle above her mouth and let it slowly drip into her mouth while she halfheartedly would swallow.  Then it was time for her immunizations and the nurses put sugar water on a pacifier and once her tongue made contact with that sugar water, she began to suck.  I was so profoundly relieved because she used that ability on bottles from that time and could at least sort-of suck.  Once she got down sucking on a bottle nipple and would get even the smallest of formula into her body, it would leak from her nose about two or so minutes later.  Her stomach would reject the formula and push it up and instead of going out her mouth, her nose would be assaulted.
  I told the nurses that something was wrong and all I got was "oh mom, sometimes babies spit up through their noses".  This was my third baby in THREE YEARS and I knew something was not right.  But the shear terror of having a sick baby scared me so badly that I just took the nurses words and let it go.  E and I were released from the hospital on my birthday three days after she was born and my family was there to celebrate her with us.  This was my first baby any of them could be a part of as she was born in CA instead of Japan like the first two.  I tried to put on a happy face as we went to Pizza Hut and had a birthday for G and I as G's birthday was only three days away.
  Within a day or two of bringing E home, she had constipation and would scream what felt like endlessly in pain as she tried to go in her diaper.  I took her to a doctor that put her on prune juice and it barely worked enough for us to get her through.  A nasty cold came through our house by the first day we were home and E was not spared.  It started with cold symptoms and while everyone else got better quickly, she appeared to shut down and was not able to eat anything at all.  By the night of the sixth day of her cold, I had nightmares any time I dozed off for an hour that she was going to die and was up checking on her constantly.  She was getting sicker and I stayed up keeping an eye on her.  As soon as the sun rose, I had her dressed and at a pediatrician's office.  As soon as he saw her condition he sent us over to the hospital to have her admitted.
  I sat weeping outside her hospital room while I listened to her scream because they kept trying to get an i.v. into her dehydrated little body.  My OB saw me in the hall and went in to keep an eye on things until it was done.  She came out and informed me that they got one into her leg and if they hadn't they were going to put it in her head.  Thankfully it didn't come to that.  I finally bonded with my newborn baby girl over that three days she was in the hospital.  It was just me and her and I held her for as much of that three days as was physically possible.  I tended to her every need and just loved her.  She was very sick with an infection and a chest x-ray ruled out pneumonia.  It took three full days of intravenous antibiotics before she was able to go home and use oral antibiotics for an additional 7 days.  I convinced her pediatrician that there was something wrong with the spitting up, weak suck, and nose leaking and he ordered a barium swallow study for her once she was discharged.
  The study showed her regurgitating her formula up and even the formula coming out her nose, but he simply labeled her with GERD and referred us to a pediatric gastroenterologist three hours away.  I took her to the very nice doctor at Loma Linda Children's Hospital a three hour drive away and she gave us baby antacids and we went home to try them.  They would make her sleep while she would still regurgitate violently from her nose and no change in the medications or doses brought her relief.  She was still constipated and a very committed and caring WIC nutritionist took special interest in my baby.  She would drive all the way to my base housing to bring me different kinds of formulas until, at last, we found one that didn't make my baby writhe in pain.  Now we had the regurgitation and colic left and no way to make it stop.  She would eat tiny amounts of formula then her body would violently reject it from her stomach and it would come shooting out through her nose.  Her airway would be blocked momentarily and she would look like she was drowning as her tiny arms would strike outward grasping at the air, her eyes wild with fear.
  One of us would always be close and rush to her to comfort her as she regained her breathing and cried from how scared she was.  Sometimes I would cry with her from the hopelessness I felt in watching her suffer.   During a short time when she was two months old and D had to leave town, my grandma came to stay with us and E was so miserable that my grandma would spend 24 hours a day tending to just her so I could take care of my other two daughters.  It was during that five days that I got diagnosed with active mono.  Exhausted from my own illness I researched colic remedies and came across Gripe Water and decided ANYTHING was better then the nothing that we were doing.  I jumped in my van and went to the one and only health store in Ridgecrest and spent a small fortune on the little dropper of colic magic.  It worked just well enough that she began to find relief and we could get what we called the "Happy Tongue" in place of a smile.  Oh how I wanted that baby to smile for me.  I finally saw signs of life in her eyes and could get her to connect to me by four months old.  Her suffering was not destroying the emotional fabric of every adult that worked to take care of her anymore.

E's Happy Tongue

  She slowly progressed from screaming in pain and waking up after one hour of sleep no matter what time of day to being reactive to D, myself, and her eager big sisters.  I kept vigil over her not really knowing what was wrong and just trying to get enough nutrition in her body for her to survive.  D and I had to get her through what we called her "episodes" when she would violently regurgitate from her nose every time we tried to feed her.  About two months after she was born her doctor switched from a local pediatrician to a Navy family practitioner for insurance reasons so that is who I would take her to for appointments.  My baby's condition never seemed to matter much to her no matter how small she stayed or how concerned the corpsmen would look at each other when they would take her vitals, weight, or length.  By the time E was losing weight every other week I took her in, I knew she was in trouble and when I asked for the forms to be filed for her to be seen by a civilian pediatrician, I began to learn the truest form of being the advocate of someone innocent and fully reliant on your fight for their wellness.