Baby Blues

Lincoln has been such a good little baby except for one little bad habit - he occasionally stops breathing. He stopped breathing for a bit when he got stuck in a gag reflex on n the hospital, but then the day we were supposed to leave the hospital he had a full on "blue spell" that lasted over a minute. It was very scary. The night before his blue spell, the nurse had talked to us about what to do if our baby ever turned a "dusky blue" color. While she was talking I thought to myself, "I wonder what dusky blue looks like?" Well I definitely found out and it's not a color I like at all.

The weird thing is that just a couple hours after his blue spell they went ahead and released us from the hospital and we came home. A few hours later he stopped breathing again. I was stressed to say the least. How would we ever sleep? We'd have to take turns watching him all night long.

We called the pediatrician and he was very upset because they had never notified him about the breathing problems. He said he never would have let them release us if he knew, so he met us at the hospital and checked us all into the pediatric ward.

The worst part of the evening was all the blood work they had to do to discover if there was some type of infection causing the apnea. They kept trying veins but they were so small they couldn't use them very well. At the end of a very long hour, Lincoln had bruised hands and arms and they had only filled half of the vials. After they left I scooped up my little babe and wept with him.

Next came x-rays and hooking him up to a monitor. The monitor was actually rather nice. We could see his oxygen levels, every time he took a breath as well as his heart rate. The alarm went off occasionally through the night, half the time it was a false alarm and at other times Lincoln just needed a little stimulation to get breathing again.

The bed they put him in was huge! He looked so tiny in that big crib. They had a nice bed for me and a tiny recliner for Daniel to sleep in. Needless to say, I slept better than Dan did that night.

The next day he did much better - the monitor didn't go off very much at all and all of his tests came back ok. I rocked the baby and daddy worked on his laptop until the doctor came to see us. He diagnosed Lincoln with reflux induced apnea. Stephen had reflux as well, but he was always a good breather :) So, the pediatrician put Lincoln on the same medication that helped Stephen and prescribed an apnea monitor for us to take home. The monitor has given us a lot of peace of mind. Sometimes new babies breathe so shallow you wonder if they are breathing at all. It's nice just to look over at the monitor and see the little flashing light that tells you that he is actually breathing. After taking an infant CPR course, we were finally released that evening and came home for keeps :)

Poor Stephen had seen very little of mommy and daddy over the last few days. Luckily for him and the rest of us, Grandma Earl showered him with attention. We're so glad she's been able to stay so long.

Lincoln has been doing extremely well since the hospital stay. To the right is a picture we took a week after his blood tests were done. His little hands still look bruised but they are healing up very nicely. The apnea monitor goes off very rarely and we haven't had any more blue spells. It looks like we'll only need the monitor for a couple more weeks. We're so grateful for all our family and friends who remembered us in their prayers. We feel so blessed.