Weight Panic at the Pediatrician's

Yeah, it's hard to get on here to write anything. A couple of weeks ago I took Isaac in to the Pediatricians Office for his two week check up. A few of you already know what happened there.

Before I get to the part where you find me in tears, I'll tell you this. I thought it was significant, but I always tend to think that these things are significant.

In the well-patient waiting room there is a television showing children's programming. The movie that was showing while we waited was the 1975 version of Charlotte's Web, starring Debbie Reynolds.

When I was a little girl I had a vinyl record of the soundtrack to this movie. I knew all the songs, and I used to act out Charlotte's death scene near the end. At the time I had neither read the book nor seen the movie, but I knew that song was sad and dramatic, and I would crawl up on my chest or table (I don't remember which it was) and pretend that I was Charlotte dying, not knowing the Charlotte was a spider.

Later in high school I would do the same thing with the death scene at the end of Antony and Cleopatra. It sounds crazy, I know, but it always made me feel better when I was low. It helped that all of the lines near the end of the play are given to female characters.

Anyway, Charlotte's web was playing, and I remembered the scene from my childhood, and I thought--this is a little treat from God, reminding me of something I enjoyed as a child. And I remembered the words to "Mother Earth and Father Time."

Back to the point of the post.

They called Isaac back, and of course the first thing you do upon arriving the examining room, is you undress your child down to his or her diaper so that a weight can be taken. I did this, taking extra time to change Isaac's diaper because it was very full, all the while telling him how I wanted to be sure to get an accurate weight. The nurse and I proceeded to the scale. The reading came back at 6 lbs. 0 oz. I told the nurse, "That's not good. He weighed more than that when we left the hospital. He weighed more than that a week ago when we weighed him at the Breast Care Center. This is very, very bad." The nurse, who must have been new, said nothing. She gave me nothing back. Just went about the business of administering Isaac's PKU. I wanted to ask her to weigh him again, but if you know me very well you won't be surprised that I didn't. I spent the next however many minutes waiting for Dr. Brown looking down at my baby, wondering how this could have happened and what I was going to do about it. Should I make an appointment with a lactation specialist immediately? Should I call my mother and tell her she was wrong, that he wasn't growing, that he didn't weigh anywhere close to 7 lbs?

Denise came in, and we talked about Isaac's feeding. I told her what had happened with the scale, and that he weighed 6 lbs 8.5 oz less than a week ago. She reassured me that it didn't sound right, and so we took him out to try the scales again. This time a more experienced nurse told us that sometimes the scales got out of whack when the mother's weight was removed from the scale as babies are being placed on the cradle. She jiggled it up and down with her own weight to make sure the calibration held. Isaac's weight came back at 7 lbs 7 oz.

I should have known immediately that feeding every two to three hours with an abundant milk supply and very little spittage could not possibly result in a weight lost of 8.5 oz. I should have known, but I didn't. Looking at Isaac you can see that he is growing. His little cheeks are filling out, and he now had a distinct bottom. He's already grown out of some of my smallest onsies.

That was a pretty scary and tragic twenty minutes for me though.