This is the next chapter in our long struggle with sick babies. If you are just tuning in, you may want to start at the beginning.

Previous Chapter: Our First Hospital Trip

 

For the next week, I was nursing Baby Colleen every two hours. Of course, she usually asked to nurse every hour and a half and nursed for a total of ten minutes, so it wasn’t difficult to keep this schedule. I knew that if she could keep eating, pooping, and gaining weight, Hubby and I could rest assured that our baby girl was not sick after all. I just needed her to not be sick.

When we went in for Colleen’s two week check-up, we were thrilled to find that she had gained two pounds that week! She had not only regained the weight that she lost the first week of her life, but she had surpassed her birth weight by almost a pound and a half.  She was now up to 8 pounds, 13 ounces.

Just one week later, we began to really worry again. Colleen started to act as if she had another blockage. She got lethargic and stopped eating well. Her little belly got round and firm. Once again, we called the doc. He said to use another glycerin suppository and then to give her one ounce of prune juice every day. He thought that she may just have a tendency toward constipation. We followed his orders. The glycerin suppository immediately made her feel better. Once again, she was seeming well and eating like a champ.

We went for her one month check-up not long after this. Colleen weighed in at around 9 and a half pounds. The doctor was quite surprised by how much weight she had gained! She was eating well, pooping well, and sleeping through the night. We were thrilled that we had found out what was wrong with our baby and that it was fixed. Now we could stop worrying.

Our wedding anniversary arrived, and my mom took Judah overnight so that Hubby and I could celebrate. We decided to go out to celebrate the night before our anniversary and then spend the whole next day together. We had a nice dinner at a restaurant with Colleen. That night at her bedtime nursing, Colleen wouldn’t eat. I didn’t think too much about it. I just thought maybe the trip to the restaurant had exhausted her and figured she would wake up during the night to nurse.

She didn’t wake up during the night.

When I woke at 6 a.m. and realized that she had not woken during the night or at her normal 5 a.m. breakfast-time, I had a moment of panic. I woke her, and she ate a little. Then she promptly threw up. I was trying not to worry. We went about trying to start our day that we had planned. A while later, I still could not get her interested in eating at all, but now her belly also looked bloated. We called the doctor.

We made the trip to the doctor’s office. He said this was not normal and that we must find out what is wrong. He made a call to the nearest children’s hospital and told them to be expecting us. This was around lunch time. We called my mom who said she could keep Judah. Then we made the hour’s drive to the children’s hospital.

We sat in the Emergency Room for what seemed like forever. Baby Colleen was fussy, but was not interested in nursing. Whenever I got her to nurse a bit, she would throw up. After a while, she just got lethargic.

When we finally got called back to a room, they started an IV and took more x-rays of her belly. We waited an eternity for a doctor to come and talk to us. He gave us three possibilities of what could be wrong with our baby. He explained them all briefly. We would have to do more tests to know for certain. He felt pretty certain about one of those being her problem but couldn’t say for certain until the testing. The first test would be a barium enema. They would do it first thing in the morning.

We finally got put into a hospital room at 1 a.m. The room had two baby beds in it, but we were the only ones in the room. That’s when I realized that we had just spent our wedding anniversary in a hospital with our six and a half week old baby. My baby was sick.

We tried to sleep on the chairs in Colleen’s room, but worry made it difficult. The morning came quickly, and with it came the barium enema. We were allowed to go into the procedure room with Colleen. In fact, they even let us help with the baby during the test. I’ll spare you the details of how this test is done. I felt so bad for my baby.

Not long into the test, the head surgeon (who would be Colleen’s doctor) declared that there was no reason to finish the test. There was no need to see the rest of her colon. He could already see the problem area. He was 99 percent certain that Colleen had Hirschsprung’s Disease. The only way to be 100 percent certain was by doing a biopsy, which they would do in surgery that afternoon. They would leave her asleep for the twenty minutes it takes to get biopsy results, then if it was positive (which he said it likely would be), they would be ready to do a colostomy.  We had no real idea what that was. They tried to explain it, but we could not picture it.

Our baby had surgery that afternoon. She had Hirschsprung’s Disease. They did a colostomy.

We went back to recovery to comfort our baby girl.

We had no idea what this would mean to our life, but we knew that God knew. We could trust Him.

 

Next Chapter: So What Is Hirschsprung's Disease?

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