Sawyer's first few days

Sawyer had a rough first few days in this world!  The day after he was born, the doctor was concerned about jaundice and recommended that he go under the lights.  For that whole day, he only left the lights to eat every 3 hours.  So our visitors didn't get to see Sawyer and Jim and I were pretty bored in the room just waiting for the next feeding.  The lights worked quickly and his skin looked much less yellow right away.  After being under the lights for 24 hours, the pediatrician wanted him to be out from under the lights to see how he would react.  On Sawyer's second day, they drew blood in the morning and weren't overly excited about the results, so they told us that they wanted to draw his blood again in 12 hours, which would be 6 pm.  Based on those results, we would either get to go home or he would have to stay.  What a long day just waiting for the time to tick by!  Our visitors were able to at least see Sawyer now though.

We got the blood results around 8 that night and the pediatrician wanted us to stay overnight to draw blood one more time in the morning.  Sawyer's bilirubin levels were going up, which is something that naturally happens as babies get older.  Another concern was his hemoglobin levels.  They were lower than anticipated, suggesting that his red blood cells may have been attacking each other.  So Sawyer had to stay.  I was "discharged" but was able to stay as a "guest" of the hospital.  Basically, the nurses said that after 11:59pm, they would pretend I wasn't there (i.e., I couldn't get pain meds, food, or anything else).  At one point over night, a cleaning person came in to clean my room until he realized I was still in there.  Obviously they really were thinking I wasn't there haha.

They drew yet more blood on Saturday morning.  The pediatrician came to give me the results after a couple of hours.  She was pleased with the levels and we would get to go home!  Yay!  She did want us to come back to the lab the next morning to get one last set of blood drawn.  Jim came and waited with me for Sawyer to get officially discharged.  After waiting several hours, I went out to the nurse's station to ask if they knew when we would get discharged.  Well, since I wasn't technically a patient anymore, I had to check with the nursery.  I think they forgot about us because after asking, a nurse came in within 10 minutes to discharge us.  We were SO excited to be heading home!