No. Body. Move.

Ssshhhh...she's asleep.

Today was a wonderful day of peace for me until about 4:00 pm. The grandmothers looked after Emma so that I could sleep in, take a long walk to try to start working off this baby weight (as if I don't have enough to deal with), and just generally get some things done. One thing of note happened before I arrived: Emma got fussy after her 12:00 feeding. More on this in a second...

When I DID walk in a little before 4, the nurse was changing Emma's dressing on her incision. It had not even been 24 hours since the medicine (aka, booger gel) had been on her incision. WOW, I can't believe how it looked today. The opening was still HUGE, but it looked so clean. This is going to be gross, but I'm going there - the edges of the incision were the good kind of pink that means skin and tissue is growing. The biggest thing is that it didn't look as deep, and I could see some more of the good pink skin/tissue coming up through the bottom of the incision. Even though I thought the overall size of the area looked bigger, the quality of the wound looked better. The nurse was encouraged, too, but we'll see what the wound care people say. I don't have a strong stomach for this kind of stuff, but I think I've become desensitized to Emma's medical issues. My mom, on the other hand, had a few moments today where she wanted to look at the incision but then started to feel sick. But she somehow didn't have a problem looking right at the giant needle sticking out of my abdomen when I had an amniocentesis. Incisions from the 2 surgeries I've had didn't bother her, but the blood and guts do, I guess. Dr. Troup didn't come by today; I know he had some surgeries, and I don't really know what he could/would have done if he HAD come by.

At 4, I fed Emma, and over the next 2 and a half hours, she cried for about an hour and a half. She was crying as Russell and I left for dinner at 6:30. BUT! The nurse we had is one of our primary nurses, meaning that when she works, she works for us. She knows that Emma isn't a fussy baby, so after we told her about the sudden change in her demeanor, she was proactive about it and spoke to a resident. The change occurred pretty much after Emma's formula changed to something more gentle on her stomach. Let's just say it's gentle coming out, but we weren't so sure it was gentle going in. So the resident prescribed Mylicon (even though it's OTC, any medication in the hospital goes through the pharmacy with a prescription). Emma was a little fussy but not bad after today's 12:00 feeding, VERY angry after the 4:00 feeding, and sleeping like an angel after the 8:00 feeding, which included the Mylicon. Russell and I stayed until about 9:30, and she was sleeping peacefully. I said in the previous paragraph that I've become desensitized to Emma's incision, and this afternoon I felt a little desensitized to her crying...not that I didn't care, but I was so exasperated that I went into robotic mom mode, just rocking Emma and patting her back, knowing that something was wrong that I couldn't fix. It was alarming and disheartening at the same time that I just felt like I had given out and given up...and then the nurse came to my rescue. Hopefully this Mylicon will continue to work and that tonight's relief isn't a fluke. What a blessing the nurse is.

Here's the only shot I got of her today - a brief moment of peace in between the screams. No. Body. Move.