Jen and I took Emma to her first doctor's appointment this afternoon. We had some anticipation because we thought that Dr Shah was going to be against Emma breast milk and when we had seen him in the hospital we had not really hit it off well with him. Today all of our reservations were proven unfounded. We had a good visit with Dr Shah, we talked about Emma's jaundice and our plans to make her better and he approved.
During the appointment Emma's weight remained 7 lbs and 12 oz and Dr Shah said that she looked very good, and has a very healthy cry. All of these were good things and were are really feeling good about Emma stabilizing out. Dr Shah also ordered another biliruben test today and this time the biliruben was down (sorry we forgot to get the number.) The levels were not down enough to get her off the light blanket yet, and but she is on the right path to getting better.
Dr Shah also discovered that Emma has a heart murmur, which sounds like it is a big concern, but many babies have a murmur and they can be as serious as a hole in the heart or just a simple irregularity that they call and "innocent murmur." Dr Shah has refereed us to an infant cardiologist who we will see soon and have this condition diagnosed.
After the visit with Dr Shah we went back to the lactation consultant to figure spend some more time trying to figure out our status with breast feeding. the lactation consultant has been fantastic with us and agreed to give us some more time to help us for a third or fourth time.
What we discovered with her help is that Jen is not producing enough milk to feed Emma on her own. It also appears almost certain that she will not be able to get that production up to the point where she will be able to feed Emma without supplementation. This is a pretty heavy blow for us, but we have a great plan to move forward and now that we have this established we can move forward with a certainty about how we are treating Emma's jaundice.
Emma has now started bottle feeding and we will continue with this as her primary form of feeding from now on. The great part about this is that we can insure that she gets her daily requirements and keep better tabs on where we are with her intake levels. As we pick up the supplementary feedings Emma will get better faster and we should see the jaundice fading faster.
So today we had a big day where we learned a lot. we did not get the answers we had hoped for but we have answers that we can work with and provide us with direction for Emma's health. We are glad to have the answers and we are looking forward to giving updates soon that will indicate how healthy Emma has become.
Thank you everyone for your prayers, they are really helping out. An special thanks to everyone for helping out in their own little (or big) ways. We will update more as we have it.
JWR
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