Chapter Five: QUESTIONS

This snuggly boy doesn't cry as much as they (hospital people) want him to, so after a quick skin-to-skin he's taken for some rubbing and some weighing and some Apgars. As he gets scrubbed down a bit, Joseph notes the little bump on his nose. What is that? It kind of stands out a bit. The nurse takes a look. Randall takes a look. He decides to call in a neonatologist for an opinion. 

In the meantime, we learn his metric weight. As the nurse goes to convert it to pounds, I turn to Joe and nearly yell, "This is your moment." For years he has practiced conversions in his head for fun; why, if not for this?? He beats the nurse's Google search but doesn't believe his own math: our baby is...smaller than five pounds? Four pounds and eleven ounces, to be exact. Whatever happened to the six pound measurement we saw at Monday's ultrasound?

By the time I've been stitched up (the real reason to want an epidural), my baby has been swaddled and photographed and snuggled by everyone in the room. I'm happy to share him, but I'm wondering if I should try breastfeeding him? Out of this entire saga, this is my single regret: I waited for someone to give me permission, not realizing until much later that his first feeding timeline was entirely up to me. And as a result, we didn't get around to trying breastfeeding for hours longer than I would have chosen. (Luckily, he has a natural talent for it.)

The nose theories begin when the neonatologist arrives. Her first thought is that maybe his nose spent some time smashed against my heart-shaped uterine wall. It feels unlikely to me (there's a bump, not a dip), but I don't have any better theories to offer. She decides to call in a couple doctor friends of hers: an ear-nose-throat specialist and a geneticist, both of whom work primarily with babies and children. We'll meet with them (plus a couple others) over the next two hospital days.

Fast forward a bit: we've moved downstairs to the mother-baby wing of the hospital. We've met new nurses and a lactation specialist, we've accepted homework assignments (apparently we need to name this baby), we've pumped and spilled colostrum (okay that one was just me), and we've learned nether-region care (...yikes). We are beyond exhausted, due primarily to having spent two restless nights in the hospital already, oh--and to giving birth. After seeing a few visitors, we send "Boy Facer" to the nursery for his next feeding and fall asleep as quickly as we can. I do not question for one second if this is the "right" thing to do, and suddenly it feels like a blessing that his first feeding wasn't from my breast. If he can have hospital milk once, he can have it again, right?

We make it through the night (feedings and medications interrupting every couple hours) and awake to a day full of nose-bump investigations. I won't realize until day three that most parents spend these days hanging out with their baby. We spend the first day either in separate places or recovering from separation (kangaroo care, always), only to be separated again. Every three hours, we're checking vitals, which is apparently a thing for tiny babies. How's his temperature? How's his glucose? Did he poop?

As the nurses monitor bodily functions, doctors and specialists theorize about and monitor the potential implications of this nose bump. Is it just a bump, or is it symptomatic of something bigger? If it were just the bump, maybe we wouldn't worry, but add in the echogenic focus from ultrasounds and his abnormally small size and my heart-shaped uterus and maybe something else is going on here. We just want to add as many pieces to the puzzle as we can while we're still in the hospital. Here are some of those pieces:

Can he breathe through that nose? Yes. Look at him, still alive.
What kind of tissue is inside there? Shrug.
Was the placenta normal? Let's send it for testing.
Does he hear normally? Maybe not. Come back for another test in a week.
Is his heart okay? Yes. EKG confirms.
Is his inner nose structurally normal? Yes. World's tiniest scope confirms.
Does he need surgery? Maybe. Come back when he's a year old.
Has his skull fused early? Nope. Lucky day.

Does he have a "syndrome"? Maybe. Let's discuss again tomorrow.

Ultimately we rule out lots of potentially related issues, but we're left with the lingering question of why that adorable bump exists. Does he have a genetic syndrome? The geneticist meets with us in such a caring way that I can tell she knows she's delivering "news." But since he has nothing immediately pressing or urgent required for his daily care, we are not concerned. The answer to the syndrome question is a probable yes, but the syndrome in question has few dramatic implications. Testing doesn't seem urgent (plus there's the added variable of the bump's development over time), so we schedule a genetics appointment around his six-month birthday.

Oh, and we've named this boy: Brooks. It reverberates as correct through my entire body when Joseph declares it his first choice. That name and this baby are both keepers!

(To read the epilogue, click here.)