One More Night-Hopefully

All cultures came back negative, so they have started to wean me off of the antibiotics a bit. Apparently it is quite common for them to not get a positive culture with a uterine infection and who knows what else I have. Today was a much better day, although I'm starting to make more frequent bathroom trips again tonight. I think this is just going to take awhile to run its course, which totally sucks. If I don't have a fever through the night and into tomorrow and I'm still relatively good, they will discharge me tomorrow and switch me over from massive IV antibiotics to massive amounts of oral antibiotics. Then I have a follow up appointment with the infectious disease doc on Friday morning. Hopefully that will be the end of it. Oh, did I ever mention that the hospital is requiring anyone who enters my room to wear a hospital gown over their clothing? It is humiliating. The infectious disease doctor said it was their protocol because he never wrote a containment order.

I'm a bit nervous about going home even thought I CAN'T WAIT to get home. I just know myself and it is going to be hard to take things slowly when I feel so guilty about all the extra work B and my parents have put in already. It is going to be hard to tell the difference between normal "new mommy" exhaustion and recovering from massive infection exhaustion. And I worry about B and my parents. Everyone has been running on all cylinders for too long now and I can see the exhaustion in all of them.

Both babies saw the pediatrician again today. Apple's bilirubin went from 17 on Saturday down to 9 something today, so we are back where we started when we left the hospital on Thursday. She is no longer on the bili table and has to go back in tomorrow for another heel stick to get checked again. Banana has been a little congested, but the pediatrician thinks it is still leftover fluid from the womb and birth and isn't a cold or anything like that. Apple is up to a chunky 4 pounds, 13 ounces and Banana is up to 4 pounds 10 ounces, so they are both already above their birth weights. Considering we were told they should be back at birth weight by 10 to 14 days, they are quite a bit ahead of schedule. I've been pumping in the hospital and they've been eating pretty good by bottle taking both my milk and formula. At times, they will each take 60 cc's per feeding, which is really good. I just hope I'm able to get both of them back on the boob a bit when I get home. I'm not ready to give up on breast feeding.

Banana also saw a pediatric orthopedist today. This doctor repeated everything all of the other pediatricians said about the bone just needing time to heal and that it should heal pretty quickly. They took new x-rays and the bone ends had shifted quite a bit since the initial x-rays on Tuesday, but the doc said this is normal. I'm almost glad I wasn't at the appointment because B said there was a bulge in his upper arm where you could tell the bone had shifted. The doc reset the arm straight and wrapped it really gently in some gauzy stuff. It looks like a cast, but isn't hard like one. We are supposed to keep his sleeve pinned across his chest to keep it stable and he will go back to the doc in 3 weeks. They gave us some copies of the x-rays from both today and Tuesday and they are a little hard to look at. But all in all, he is doing just fine.

After the doctor's appointments today, B and my dad brought the babies by the hospital to visit. It was so incredibly great to see all of them. My dad and B looked pretty tired. The babies were a bit sleepy. I held my baby boy for awhile until he woke up a bit. He looks incredibly sad, but incredibly cute and tough at the same time in his pseudo cast. I just can't wait until we can handle him without being careful about the arm and we can see his arm along with the rest of him. At least with the new cast we can see his little hand wiggle around whereas it was covered before. I fed Banana some milk while my dad fed Apple and then we watched them sleep for awhile. I held my baby girl close on my chest while she slept and it was perfect.

I sent my mom to the house tonight with all of them so that B could get some rest and my dad wouldn't be alone with both babies all night. So I'm alone at the hospital tonight, but hopefully it is just for one night. I can't wait to get the hell outta dodge.