RSV

About six weeks or so before Ivy was born, I got really, really sick. Like, the terrible, terrible, uncontrollable coughing kind of sick. Eventually the feeling sick part went away, but the terrible cough lingered for about two months. I was still coughing badly when Ivy was born, and people don't look at you too nicely when you're hacking your head off and holding a new baby :/  oh well, what could I do. Hannah and Joshua had had their turn with the sickness (more brief) before the babyw as born, but it wasn't until a week or so after Poppy came home from the hospital that Eli came down with it. And then, of course, so did Poppy.

Now if you haven't had a baby lately you might not be aware that they always tell you to go the ER if you have a baby under two months old with a fever. But they never tell you what they will DO to your baby if you go to the ER and say they have a fever. And it never crossed my mind to explicitly ASK what they would do. I always just assumed that it was because the higher body temperature could do more damage to their sensitive little systems, but apparently that's not their concern. Anyway, when Ivy was almost two weeks old, she caught the cold (on top of the normal new baby congestion) and was really miserable. For about a day and a half we watched her closely to make sure her temperature didn't climb past the threshold, but on the evening of her two-week birthday, she crossed the line. So once again, Carmen came to the rescue and stayed with the older kids while we took our little baby to Rady Children's Hospital, assuming they would suction some mucus, check her out and send her home.

Boy were we wrong. Apparently when a less-than-two-month-old baby has a fever (for any reason -- even though in this case it was obviously from the sickness that had been in her home longer than she had), they perform a mandatory spinal tap. Having the memory of my own spinal tap fresh in our minds, this was a very unwelcome surprise to us. Why, we wondered, had the doctors we had been calling about her sickness, who had been telling us to watch for the fever and giving suggestions on remedying her illness, not told us what they would do if we took her to ER? Why the HECK would they not have said to take her in and tell the ER doctors that she is sick but not mention the fever, and let them take her temperature themselves to avoid an unnecessary and awful procedure on a two-week old baby? Because when she was actually at the ER they didn't even get a fever reading, and they said yes it's most likely because of her cold, but since WE reported a slightly higher temperature, they insisted on doing the spinal tap. Well, we watched them stab that tiny baby in the spine three times during the course of the night before they finally gave up because they couldn't get enough spinal fluid. That combined with the deep lung suctioning they performed repeatedly (tubes down the nose hooked to a machine that sucked gallons of mucus out of that poor baby's lungs)...it was torture to watch her go through it all. I will never as long as I live forget the awful sound of her screaming while they did that suctioning. Like the prolonged, tortured screaming of a piglet being butchered. Sorry that's gross and graphic but that's the only comparison I can think of! It was awful! But it was a sound I would endure many, many times over the next five days.

After abandoning their attempts to retrieve the spinal fluid, probably around 3 a.m., they informed us that she would be have to be admitted to the hospital to receive treatment for RSV. Really all that means is they do that awful suctioning every few hours, leave the baby hooked up to oxygen tubes, and watch to make sure she doesn't need  to be moved to ICU. Thank goodness, we had brought her in early enough that the constant suctioning was enough to keep the infection from getting too serious. So, Seth and I had taken her to the ER with the thought of getting her checked out and suctioned and then going home, but I ended up not leaving that hospital for five days. For five days I did nothing but sit and hold that little baby in my arms and see her through the trauma of deep suctioning. I read my books, watched a lot of Dick Van Dyke on the tablet Seth left for me, and I believe I took a shower twice. I left the hospital room once to see Seth and the kids for about twenty minutes, and Seth visited one additional time for about an hour or so. But I never left that hospital room besides that one time, and it was a very lonely, difficult experience to be watching my baby suffer alone all that time. 

Anyone who's known Ivy as a baby knows what a Mama's girl she is, and I attribute that fully to the time she and I spent together in that hospital during her sickness, being each other's only source of comfort. (Granted she was already inclined that way, since up to this time, she would not sleep during the night -- even when she was well -- unless I was holding her. I didn't lie down to sleep for weeks after she was born! You can imagine the soreness in my tuches.) But it was a precious time that truly allowed us to bond, and I'm grateful that we were led to get her the help she needed to clear out her sickness. Fun fact: every single nurse and doctor that attended us independently christened her "Peanut" because she just....was. A darling, tiny little peanut. My poor, sick little peanut.