This is part 2 of Noelle’s birth story. You should read part 1 first if you haven’t already.

Jason went with Noelle to the NICU while I waited to be transferred.  After what seemed like an eternity, Jason and the neonatologist came back to my room to tell me that the chest x-ray showed that Noelle had a spontaneous pneumothorax.  She explained that sometimes when newborns take their first breath the pressure can cause a small hole in the lung that causes some air to escape.  She said that they would put her under an oxygen tent (to provide a high oxygen environment) for 4 hours in hopes that the hole would seal itself off and the air outside her lung would go away.  Since she had to be under the oxygen tent, I wouldn’t be able to nurse her and they would start IV fluids.  After 4 hours, they would do another chest x-ray and see how she was doing.  The good news was her pulse oximetry, blood gas, and several other tests were all perfect.

Once I was discharged from labor and delivery, I was able to go see Noelle in the NICU before I went to my post-partum room.  She was under her oxygen tent, which was very hard for me to see, but she was sleeping and looked very comfortable.  I was able to spend about 20 minutes with her before they took me to my post-partum room where Jason and I tried to rest for a while.

Around 5:00 pm the neonatologist came up to my room to let us know that Noelle’s chest x-ray was much better and they were going to take her off the oxygen tent.  They would monitor her for about 2 hours off the oxygen to make sure she still looked good, and then I would be able to nurse her.  When we went to see her, she was wide awake and looked very ready to eat!  She nursed very well and didn’t have any changes on her monitors while she was nursing.

The rest of the evening and night went well.  The difficult part was that I had to go down to the NICU from my room every 3 hours to feed her and also make sure I was getting my checks and vitals from my nurse.  My nurse was great; she even came up to the NICU to take my vitals so I didn’t have to go back down.  As an added bonus, Jason got to sleep the whole night that night since there wasn’t a crying baby in our room!

The next day was a little more difficult.  We anticipated that Noelle would be discharged from the NICU the next morning and would spend the rest of the time in our post-partum room until we went home.  But her x-ray Thursday morning wasn’t quite as good as they had hoped, and since she would be in the hospital one more day anyway, they decided to keep her there.  They also wanted to do some additional testing because she appeared to still have some fluid in her lungs, which could be due to infection.  They also wanted to do a kidney ultrasound because sometimes babies that have a spontaneous pneumothorax at birth have kidney disease.  She also did not pass her hearing test, which made them more worried about kidney problems for some reason.  We found out later in the evening that her kidney ultrasound was normal.

She also had an incident that evening where she choked on some spit up and her heart rate dropped, which could have kept her in the NICU for another day, but the neonatologist looked at the monitor records and wasn’t concerned about it.  When I went up at 3am to feed her, her nurse said that she had vomited her entire last feeding and her belly was very hard and distended, so they did an x-ray and she had lots of gas in her belly.  They thought about restarting her IV fluids and putting a tube in her stomach to suck out some of the air, but thankfully they just watched her hoping it wouldn’t happen again.  Thankfully after her next feed she kept everything down and her belly stayed soft.  I made Jason come down to the NICU and hold her upright and get lots of burps out of her after that feeding!

I went down to the NICU around 9:00 am to wait for her to wake up to eat.  I was very nervous that her x-ray would still show air outside her lungs or that due to her other issues they would make her stay another day.  The neonatologist came in shortly after and said that her chest x-ray was much better and that she could go home!  They weren’t worried about her vomiting issue since it just happened once.  She also said we would see an audiologist to check on her hearing, but the doctor felt like she responded to sound appropriately for a newborn and wasn’t too worried about it.

Later in the morning we packed up all our stuff, I got discharged, and then we waited for 11:17 am so she could have her 48 hour newborn screen and we could go home!  We were so excited for her to meet Ethan since he wasn’t allowed in the NICU, and we were glad that we would all be home together as a family.  It was pretty heart breaking for Ethan to show up to the hospital in his big brother shirt and say “go see baby Noelle!” only to tell him he couldn’t see her yet.

So far, Noelle is a very good baby.  She is nursing well, pooping and peeing well, and even likes to sleep in her pack ‘n play.  She is actually sleeping better during the day than she is at night!  She has some good happy awake time during the day and also loves being snuggled.  Ethan is in love with her and wants to hold her, kiss her, and hug her a lot.  He doesn’t seem to be too jealous (yet), and is very interested in whatever she is doing.  Even though her first 2 days weren’t ideal, we are so happy to be at home and adjust to our new life together.

I also have to mention how great everyone was at the hospital: my nurses, Noelle’s nurses, the neonatogists and nurse practitioner, and my doctors who came to check on me up in the NICU.  It made a hard situation a little easier!