At the hospital, the nurses were expressing just a little bit of concern that Lukas hadn't peed yet. He'd had a few BM's of just meconium, and he urinated a couple of times before his circumcision, but hadn't peed since his surgery that morning. They told us to go ahead and take him home, but to call the ward if he hadn't peed by 9 p.m. We called when he hadn't urinated, but since he wasn't really fussing or anything, the nurse told us to call back in the morning if he hadn't been able to wet a diaper.
Lukas has, so far, been a day sleeper. He spent all evening the first day home sleeping in his Pack 'n Play in the dining room (thanks to the ladies and gentlemen of KPL for that AWESOME contraption). He started to get fussy at bedtime, however, on his first night at home. He was, we thought, extremely gassy. That was a problem we'd experienced on his second night in the hospital, so we gave him some gas drops and spent the next 6 hours or so bouncing, burping, rocking, and doing just about everything we could think of to helping pass gas. Nothing was working, and somewhere around 2 a.m., his screams turned into clear expressions of absolute and total pain. It was AWFUL. Lukas was letting out these horrible, high-pitched, short little wails that just broke both of our hearts (and my mother's-- she was there trying to help us). We called the nurses, and they told us to call our pediatrician's answer service, which would relay the call to him. He would tell us what to do.
At about 3 or so, we spoke to a nurse in Knoxville who had taken the call to the pediatrician, and she told us to give him an ounce of formula and see if he was able to pee. She warned us that if he hadn't peed by the time she called back in 2 or 3 hours, we'd need to take him to the emergency room. We were both so worried, and while Lukas had finally fallen sleep on top of me, we knew something was wrong. In hindsight, he was starting to show signs of dehydration- his skin was kind of ashy and looked more wrinkly than it had in the hospital. The nurse had told us to watch the soft spot on the top of his head, and it wasn't sunken like she had said it might be if he was dehydrated, but now we know the dehydration was starting to show.
We gave him that ounce of formula...and he drank it so fast I was afraid he'd make himself sick. I felt awful. My son was just so crazy hungry and thirsty that it was sending him into hysterics, and I couldn't tell because I had no way of knowing how much fluid he was getting through nursing. Lukas was was exhausted from almost 6 straight hours of crying that he immediately and finally fell sleep. As far as I can remember (the whole thing's a blur), we put Lukas in his bassinet, and Pete and I fell into a really fitful, scared sleep for a couple of hours.
The nurse called again somewhere around 6:30 and asked if he had wet his diaper yet. I sprang out of bed to check, and he hadn't. She said we needed to go to the E.R. and we got ready in about ten minutes. Lukas hadn't been home for a day, and I was just 2.5 days post-partum, but we were going back to the hospital. Few things can make you feel crappier-- not only is your kid sick, but you're worried that you're not going to be able to do this and keep him safe if you couldn't even make it through his first 12 hours at home without a catastrophe happening.
We got to the ER and the nurses seemed genuinely happy to see us. I imagine that after you spend an evening taking care of people who are really seriously sick, or drunk, or made a stupid decision that ended poorly for them or for their kids, it's nice to see a sleeping baby, even if he doesn't feel good. Lukas was still fast asleep at this point-- he was just that worn out from crying all night.
After a bladder scan, which showed that he did indeed have about 1 ml of urine in his bladder, Lukas peed on the nurse. I started bawling, and Pete sat there comforting me while asking the nurses questions. They gave him a bottle of Pedialyte, which the kid drank with everything he had. After checking to make sure that nothing else was wrong, we sat in the ER for an hour and were discharged with instructions to supplement his breastfeedings with formula and offer him Pedialyte between feedings.
I am so relieved to know what was wrong with him. He looks a million times better this afternoon- his color is back and his skin is filled out. In fact, he's turned around 180 degrees from looking like a wrinkly old man to about the cutest newborn I've ever seen (I'm biased).
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