Next episode...

I called everyone involved with helping me with the tea and let them know what is going on. That if Emily got worse or if we heard a positive on the prognosis that I would not be there for the tea and that someone else was going to have to run the show. So we went through days of waiting and waiting. I finally found the paperwork from her visit to the NICU.

I began to scour them and look up all the words and terms on the paper. As I read it over and over again I realized how stupid I had been. Why hadn't I read all of this when we got home and forced myself to understand all the medical terminology. I am not usually a hide my head in the sand kind of gal when I am presented with problems, but that is just what I had been doing all these long weeks. And I am not going to say that I didn't a little later on in this story, or that I don't occasionally do it now, but I was not going to do it anymore when it came to my child. Someone was going to listen to me, and someone was going to help us.

The paper said that we should have been expecting this all along. It told us that Emily had a condition that caused her to have too much blood in her body. This condition was often the cause of childhood and adult onset leukemia. The condition is called Polycythemia anemia. It often occurs in babies but is usually cleared up with a "blood letting" before they leave the hospital, but Emily's had needed more than one and held one, or so it said on the paperwork. It also said on the paperwork that there was a 60% mortality rate for babies that have a pulmonary hemorrhage when they were born. Yes, I finally read what had actually happened to her, a pulmonary hemorrhage.

So Emily and I sat in my house for days waiting on word from the doctor. She called every day, we went to the office every day, tests, calls, prayers, and tears. That is what our life was like. Then on Friday the doctor called with news that the first preliminary culture had come back negative. But we weren't out of the woods yet. So I decided that I would go ahead with the tea and do what I needed to do.

As all of this was going on I was able to coherent for most of the time. Having to protect my child somehow pulled me out of the psychosis for a bit. Somewhere in all of this I completely gave up the nursing Emily. I gave up the pumping and the nursing. However, I did not go on the antidepressants either. You see, I was better now. Right? I had somehow been able to do the things I needed to do...