Gracie @ UNC Children's Hospital

We had a scary incident with Gracie yesterday. We've known she has reflux (just like Jamie did) and had hoped to prevent any incidents like Jamie had (aspiration pneumonia at just 20 days old), BUT she had other ideas despite being on medicine already. She spit up a bunch of blood and breastmilk, so I took her to the CCH ER, but they ended up transfering her to UNC Children's Hospital in Chapel Hill since Central Carolina does not have a PICU and her lungs showed signs of possible pneumonia. Gracie got to go by helicopter which made Daddy really jealous...we went to the house and picked up some stuff since I knew I'd need to stay with her as long as she's here since I'm breastfeeding.

So far, she's doing much better. She's out of the PICU and in a regular peds. room, nothing bad has come back from the labs, she's nursing well and dirtying diapers - all good. Hopefully 48 hours of antibiotics and nothing bad on her labwork will mean this was just some ugly reflux-related incident and not something else. She looks pretty good right now.

THIS is why I breastfeed - among many other reasons. If we were formula-feeding, she wouldn't have been even put on reflux medicine until different formulas would have been tested out to see if there was a feeding sensitivity. Breastmilk is the gentlest thing she can get and the best for her. When Jamie had something like this happen, I knew for sure I would NOT be supplementing with formula, let alone weaning to formula. I bought a good pump and haven't looked back. I already know my teaching schedule for next year should work out well for pumping (yay!). At least I know the problem isn't WHAT she's eating even if it is HOW things are going odwn/coming up.