Kyla 2.0

So where did I leave off....Kyla had just been taken to the NICU. I won't go through all the NICU stuff because it changed on a minute to minute basis it seemed like. She was admitted there for 8 days due to high bilirubin levels. Bilirubin can be dangerous in high levels obviously and she was teetering right on the boarder of very high levels. She was under 3 lights and had one underneath her. Thats quite a bit more then the norm jaundice treatment. They concluded that her head was not a subgaleal bleed but just lots of irritation and bruising. The poor girls head hurt so bad for the first couple days. Because she had dead red blood cells breaking down from her head it just caused her bilirubins to keep going up. She had to get her level below a 10 and then only rebound 3 points after not being under the lights for a day in order for us to take her home. On Sunday June 26th her level was a 9.5 so she went off the lights all that day. We were able to give her a bath and hold her all we wanted. Right in the middle of our favorite day as parents so far we got some bad news. Her O2 sats were running kinda low...meaning she wasn't getting as much oxygen as she needed. They told us that the bilirubin lights can make her stuffy and since they had suctioned her out a couple of times they might have irritated the mucus membranes that are so soft still in her nose. That would cause her to not get the breaths she needs on her own and she would need to go on some oxygen. They said it wouldn't stop us from going home, we'd just have to take her home on oxygen. Not our ideal but all we wanted was to take her home. So Monday morning we called in to see if we'd be able to bring our daughter home that day. Our nurse said her bilirubin test was 12 so as long as she passed her carseat test we could! We were thrilled and immediately drove over there. The car seat test for the NICU are seriously more intense then the regular ones. They have to sit in the carseat for an hour and a half and keep there O2 sats above an 85. David and I were only there for the last 45 minutes and I swear we were both close to having a heart attack. Kyla kept dropping to like 88 and then she'd pull herself together and get back in the 90's. We watched the clock tick down until the last second the carseat test was complete...except the nurse wasn't in the room with us. So while we waited for her we continued to panic. All the sudden Kyla dropped to an 84 right as the nurse was walking in. She came back up so quickly that the alarm didn't go off and I don't think the nurse saw it. I still feel like we got away with that. Since we've been home we've been to our pediatrician 3 times and followed up with her bilirubin and oxygen. The bilirubin went up 3 points the day after we brought her home. Our dr told us that it might be binding to my breastmilk and just circulating back through her system so we started supplementing with formula. Now she is not a yellow baby. Big accomplishment :] We started to ween her off the oxygen to see how she'd do. Daily she got a little better but we still had our hiccups. Like when she'd eat and sleep she'd drop lower. One night David and I realized that she had tons of mucus built up in her little body and we spent like 3 hours pounding it out of her. A little bit every 10 minutes or so. We saw our dr the next day and he told us to just take her off the oxygen and watch the monitor for a while. If she was running lower 90's upper 80's he was fine with that and to get rid of it. The oxygen was making her mucusy so it was like a double edged sword. So 7/5 we took her off the oxygen so she was Kyla 1.5 for a while and then 7/8 we trusted her enough to take her off the monitor! Kyla 2.0! Wireless Kyla is amazing. I can't explain how much I love being able to just pick her up and walk around. Oh the little things we take for granted. Well to quote the pediatrician our daughter is perfect. She's got tons of dark hair but it is starting to get lighter on the tips. She makes tons of funny faces including an amazing "O" face and when she's not hungry and you touch her lips she purses her lips and its adorable. She makes David and I laugh constantly. She smiles a lot and she has, no joke, laughed twice since I've had her home. She's changed my entire world and I couldn't be happier.