Troubles!

Things went really well during Chase's delivery but things were not so great after. That night I got the worst headache I've ever had. It was excruciating when I sat up and it made it very difficult to take care of Chase. I told the nurse and she said that I might have a spinal headache. A side effect of the epidural. They said if my headache didn't go away I might have to have a blood patch. A blood patch is where they take blood from my arm and then inject it into my back to fill in an air bubble that is causing my headache.

Unfortunately, my headache did not go away and I had to have the blood patch. I felt instantly better and I was grateful for the relief. The next day was New Year's day and we were able to go home. That night my headache started coming back and getting worse. The next day I had to call the Dr. and they suggested that I go back to the hospital and have another blood patch done. Apparently, it can take more than once to fix the problem.

I went back to the hospital and this time they injected a larger amount of blood into my back. Again I felt instantly better and I was ready to go home. As we started to go home I felt a headache coming on again but I thought this might be because of sleep deprivation or dehydration.

Two days later, Monday, I was feeling worse and unfortunately I was all by myself. Cody's parents had to go back to work and since my Mom was in Virginia, she was not able to come and help me out. Cody had to go back to work because the school district does not allow you to take off the day before or the day after Christmas break.

I called the Dr. once again and they talked to the head anesthesiologist and they determined that I needed to come in and have a consultation. I had to call Cody and have him leave work to take me to the hospital once again. After speaking with the anesthesiologist he determined that I still had a spinal headache and I could either wait it out or have another blood patch. He said that if I was a normal person (yes, we all know I'm not normal) he would suggest to just drink caffeine and it would cure itself, but since I was a brand new mom and I needed to take care of a newborn, he would suggest I do another blood patch. Now the blood patch was kind of painful and I really didn't want to do it again. I finally made the decision to once again have a blood patch and once again I instantly felt better. And thankfully, this time it did not come back! I now had a horribly bruised back, but that was something I could deal with.

On top of my issues, Chase had jaundice. The day we came home Chase's bilirubin count was a little high. The hospital delivered a machine called a bili blanket. It was this little rectangular pad that glowed that we were supposed to put under his clothes 24/7.

My little glow worm

Every other day we had to take Chase to the hospital to get his foot pricked. After about a week we were finally able to take him off of the lights because his levels came down. Then we had to test him again and unfortunately his levels started to go back up.

The Dr. decided that we needed to run some more tests to make sure they weren't missing anything. We put him back on the lights and had more blood tests done. I was so worried that there was something more seriously wrong. Thankfully all of the tests came back normal and after another week we were able to take him off the lights permanently.