When I woke up on going home day I had a feeling that things would not go as planned. Oliver looked as orange as a pumpkin. Last night his bilirubin level was slightly elevated so the hospital pediatrician wanted to repeat the test in the morning. My heart sank because I was quite sure that he would be going under phototherapy, especially since his face was so bruised.
It turns out that I was right and the pediatrician wanted him under the lights during the day with a repeat level at 4pm. He would still come out of the nursery every three hours for me to nurse, but I would continue supplementing and hopefully the level would come down. As much as I understand this completely, my hormones were going quite crazy and the day became very depressing to me. Thankfully the level did not go up and actually went down so he came to our room at about 5pm. I was discharged, but he was still in the charge of the nursery. He had a repeat level at 9 and then hopefully could go home at 10pm. When the level came back, it went up slightly and the pediatrician said to put him back under lights. Thankfully the nursery nurse, Lisa, was a nurse I used to work with and she convinced the pediatrician that I knew what I was doing because I'm a nursery nurse and that I was supplementing and had a doctors appointment already set for Monday so he was able to come home. Yay! We were home free. Or so I thought.
We were just starting out the door when a woman stopped us. I scored very high on the postpartum depression scale so they had to have someone from psych talk to me to make sure that I would be safe. I spoke with the woman for about an hour. Frankly, she did not want to discharge me. She felt I was very fragile. I am. I agree. They had to call my doctor to make sure that he felt it was ok for me to go home. She also made sure that Jake was going to be home with me and take care of me for awhile. So we had to have a safety plan and then we finally were able to go home at 11pm.
After a very emotionally draining day, we pulled into our driveway at midnight. I am very thankful to be home.
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