NICU & More Bad News

We were a few hours away from going home. Melissa believed that Dylan was not thriving as he should be. I was still in complete denial and tried to convince her that he was fine and we should take him home as soon as possible. Thank God Melissa did not listen to me then. She asked one of the attending pediatricians to take a look at him.

The attending doctor took a look at Dylan and did not like what she saw. She saw that he was too floppy for a newborn. She also noticed that he was starting to get jaundiced. She told us that she wanted to take Dylan to the NICU (Neo-Natal Intensive Care Unit). We followed them to the NICU and watched as Dylan was placed in an incubator. They right away began testing him and the bad news started coming at us.

He was jaundiced so they placed him under the blue lights to improve that.

He was hypotonic, which means that his muscles were too loose and weak. They tested him for this by placing him on his stomach. A normal healthy newborn will turn their head left or right so they can breath. Dylan just lay there even though he couldn't breath that way.

Over the next few days, the news kept coming at us.

He was not breast feeding, so we tried bottle feeding. We were ecstatic if he could manage an ounce of formula at a time. A normal healthy baby would be drinking at least 4 ounces. It got to the point that the doctors were so concerned over his inability to eat that they inserted a feeding tube through his nose into his stomach that they could insert formula through.

If the attending doctor had not taken Dylan to the NICU and instead we had taken him home, we very well could have starved him to death as we tried to continue to fruitlessly breastfeed him.

They pointed out to us that he didn't just have tags on his ears, he also had tags in his ear canal as well as pits on his ears.

Finally, the worst news so far hit us. He had extremely small kidneys. They were not capable of working at the level that his body required. They figured this out by doing a test of his creatanine level. If your numbers are too high, it means that your kidneys are not properly filtering out the impurities in your blood stream.

We were looking at the distinct possibility that my son who was not even a week old could be in kidney failure and he may require a kidney transplant or he could die....