27 June 2008

Naina's first week

Naina came home late. When she was born, we wanted to take her home after two days. But this wasn't to be.

During the trauma that was three days of labour pains, Naina did a big poo. In utero poo is known as mec(onium) liquor and then during the birthing process, the baby gets it into his/her mouth. Pretty gross huh?

So Naina was under close observation. Deepti developed a fever during childbirth and then on day 1 so did Naina. At first they monitored closely, but on day 2, the hospital doctors decided to wheel her into SCN (Special Care Nursery).

Day 3 - With Deepti in Special Care Nursery


The IV lines went in, then IV antibiotics (genta and ben pen for those who were interested, meaning no causative organism identified) and she stayed in Special Care Nursery for 5 days.


We met some great people (not nurses, lol) who were amazing support for Deepti and I. They helped me learn to use the camera, easy ways for Deepti to breastfeed, people who's childbirth/new borns were in a much more parlous state that Naina ever was. N was born at 39 weeks and weighed in at 3.45 kg. The baby next to us was born at 28 weeks (mother had eclampsia) and weighed about 1.5 kg at birth.

I remember thinking how enormous Naina looked compared to those kids - and that if we turned around and didn't watch her, one of those smaller ones would end up in her mouth.

N also developed jaundice and here she is at the tanning salon. The photos are a bit funky because I took them on my mobile which wasn't compatible with the blog.

2 comments:

Andrew Scott said...

It sounds like it would've been pretty stressful. With all the things that can go wrong at childbirth, it's a wonder the human race ever managed to reproduce successfully enough to survive.

Anonymous said...

You remind me of Max's birth. No merconium but after two days of pushing he was straight to the neo-natal ward. At 40 weeks 3 days he was the biggest in the ward so surrounded by tiny fagile babies they had to find Max a bigger size oxygen bubble (he kicked the standard one off) and put up with him pulling his feeding tubes out and wiggling away from (and so setting off) the "I've stopped breathing alarm". It is amazing how resiliant babies actually are!