November 21-26th, 2010

Well on November 21, 2010 at 5:46 pm our lives changed forever.  That is when Baby Griffin came into our lives with a little assistance from the Dr.  He weighed 8 pounds, 3 ounces and was 20 1/4 inches long.

  

Shortly after he was born they wisked him off to the nursery.  The nurse told me that they were having difficulty regulating his oxygen levels.  Trey went into the nursery with them.  He knew the people that were working with Griffin which made it nice.  They were in fact having trouble getting his oxygen level where it needed to be.  They decided to put him on oxygen to try and open his lungs up.  The next morning his oxygen levels were still not where they wanted them to be.  So they decided to put him on antibiotics as a percautionary, and do an echo of his heart.  They had also placed him under the billi light for jaundice.  His echo showed that he had two small heart defects.  He has a atrium septum defect and a ventricular septum defect. 

 

Needless to say I was not in the best frame of mind after finding this out.  Then the doctors decided to move Griffin to the NICU upstairs at the hospital.  There were several babies downstairs and they thought it would be better to monitor him more closely upstairs.  So he relocated.  He was placed under a stronger billy light for his jaundice and his oxygen levels could be more closely monitored.  We could go up every three hours to feed him, but he could only be out of his "tanning bed" for about 30 or 45 minutes at a time.  After he moved upstairs the attention began to shift from his oxygen levels and heart to his jaundice level which was continually climbing.  And one morning as we were about to walk into his room, Griffin's nurse stopped us and said, I just want to warn you, we had to put an IV in the top of his head!  That is what the little clear helmet thing is covering in the picture.

Griffin got to move back downstairs because his oxygen level had improved and the regular nursery was equipped to handle his jaundice.  We then found out that we were going to be celebrating Thanksgiving in the hospital.  Trey had to work on Thanksgiving night.  Since we found out we were going to have to go to Little Rock to see the Cardiologist we decided that it would be best for Trey to save his days off for our Little Rock trip.  So for Thanksgiving we had Cracker Barrel's Thanksgiving special. 

Then the morning of November 26th, we got the best news we had all week.  Griffin's jaundice level dropped from 17 to 13!  We were going to get to go home!  So Nana started packing up all of our belonings.  Even though we were going home there was still a lot to do.  They had to do his circumcision before we were released, and we had to set up a doctors appointment for Monday.  Finally at about 2:30 we started home!