Thursday, July 14, 2011

Day 4

We're in the hospital now and Eva is looking a LOT better. She was smiling when I came in. She sits up for long periods of time. She is back to her weight from a month ago, although she's still a little puffy. For the last three days we've been in a shared room (although empty the first night) but today we moved to a single room. It's a lot nicer, and I napped with Eva this afternoon. The last two nights our roommate has been a kid with a nebulizer who's in a fair amount of pain, so not super restful. At the same time, Eva's been sleeping lots and lots.

When I came in a doctor was talking to Emily. One of our goals is to try to explain as much as we can as often as we can so that everyone gets the picture. We think this was just slow weight loss because of teething pains. I think Emily and Linda did a good job of keeping her fed and drinking, so there was no crisis, just this continuous loss of weight. We were tricked by several other aspects also. Sam had a period where he leaned up. Eva never had a fever, never threw up, never cried a lot. She was always a little more serious than Eli, so it's not as if she went from continuous smile to the pursed mouth. Anyway, she seems much better now. I think here hospitals are also faster to take people in. Emily was in the hospital for less than three days when she gave birth to Sam, but Eva will get at least five days for dehrydation. It also means that probably we need to be a little less panicked by the thought of a hospital stay here. It's a more common thing and not always a sign of extreme illness.

This morning we also did an MRI. Eva was close to sleep anyways, and they gave her some medicine, and she did fine through the MRI. The info we get back from that should be reassuring in terms of making sure she's still hitting her marks for development. But I am feeling a lot more reassured and she seems fairly sturdy today. Initially we were to leave tomorrow, but they want to do the test for the two rare syndromes just to be sure, but we're thinking that the symptoms are not a close match.

One of our language teachers came by for an hour today also. It was fun to see her. She held Eva and fed her some (picture below). It made us happy to have her around. She's probably one of the most interesting people we know. Her life hasn't been easy, and she can be a little critical, but she also has a totally different way of looking at life.

Emily's saying that Eva Helen reminds her a little of her grandma, who would get her teeth adjusted and then have trouble eating for a while. It was a funny observation.

What a strange few days these have been! The truth is the twins were pretty healthy up until now, which may have also been a piece of why this seemed to surprise us so much. This parenthood thing is really a lot more responsibility than we realized! I know this probably but won't be our last hospital visit, but I wouldn't mind another relatively calm spell for a while. And it may help us to appreciate that as much work as these three are, things could really be a lot more challenging.




(The pictures are a little blotchy because I shot this off my little tablet computer)

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