Our first (and second, and third) Trip to the Hospital

There are a lot of “firsts” that I am anticipating in this first year of Shiloh’s life.  First time rolling over, first time sitting up, first tooth, and so on.  One of the firsts I was not looking forward to was the first time we took her to the hospital.  Since she was born, Shiloh has had a lot of vomiting (or “boking” as they would say in Northern Ireland).  Right around Thanksgiving, it started getting worse.  For example, one morning she was lying in her Baby Moses Basket and managed to hit the wall with some big-time baby throw up.  Another time I was holding her and she threw up so much that the entire right side of my shirt was dripping wet from baby throw up mixed with red stuff in her little baby throw up.  While I was waiting for the doctor to call me back after that episode, I found myself collapsing onto the floor with my baby in my arms and just crying.  Toby came over and did his best to comfort us both, lying right next to us and doing his best to snuggle.  The doctor told us to take Shiloh to Children’s Hospital for observation.  A few hours later, we were sent home from the hospital with a new medicine, changed from the one she had been on for the prior two weeks (half her life at that point), and told to come back if she didn’t get better.  Two days later we were back, this time requiring blood work (from which both of her little hands still have bruises) and a scheduled ultrasound for the next day of her digestive track to see if there was a blockage.  After the ultrasound (marking our third hospital trip in five days), the results were thankfully all good, but her medicine was changed yet again.  So far that seems to have at least changed the projectile vomit to just regular vomit (and eliminated the acid in the vomit so her esophagus doesn't get damaged).  There is really no way to describe how hard it is to watch your new baby be in pain and also how scary it is to watch a little four week old get poked by big needles, hooked up to beeping machines and scanned with baby-sized ultrasound wands.  Thankfully, the doctors at the Royal Jubilee Children’s Hospital seem to understand that a hospital can often be scarier for the parents than the child.  They quickly ruled out pyloric stenosis and confirmed that Shiloh just has extreme acid reflux.  The entire time they worked to reassure us and tried to be as gentle as one can be when inserting a stiff and shiny needle into wiggly and doughy baby hands.  Now that we are on the mend and seem to have the correct medicine dosage dialed in, we are all quite thankful that this “first” is past us, and we are moving onto the next exciting milestone in Shiloh’s life.  Hopefully the next “first” is more along the lines of a typical milestone and less along the lines of one involving a medical team. 

They had to wrap her hand up to keep the IV in her hand.