The Glow Worm Machine
Jaundice is a common condition for newborns — Justin had it and now Chelsea has it too, though hers is a bit more serious than his was. Justin blew a 16 on the Jaundice-alyzer while Chelsea hit 18, well above the legal limit in California. Her skin does look a bit yellow but not any more yellow than Justin’s did at one week.
In most cases Jaundice goes away naturally after a week or two with exposure to sunlight but Chelsea’s pediatrician decided to err on the side of caution and prescribe a phototherapy “bili blanket” in order to speed up the process. A bili blanket is a device that looks and sounds just like a portable video projector. It has a thick fiber optic cable protruding from it which is connected at the other end to a thin flexible mat with a web of fiber optic cables criss-crossing it. The fibers emit a very bright blue light and when the mat is placed against the baby’s skin the light helps speed the breakdown of bilirubin in the body, which is the cause of Jaundice.
On Monday night a medical courier delivered the bili blanket to us and gave us a quick tutorial. Later that night we wrapped it around Chelsea and and then wrapped her up in her trusty Miracle Blanket. When we fired up the machine Chelsea looked like a neon-blue glow worm! It was both cute and sad, though she didn’t seem to be in any discomfort. While she was receiving her treatment I looked through the user manual to see how long we were supposed to use it each time but of course it only said to check with your doctor, which we couldn’t do because it was 9:00 pm. So I guessed that 25 minutes was a good amount of time. It was only when Susan called the doctor the next day that we learned we were supposed to use it 24/7!
So she’s been a little glow worm ever since. As I write she sleeps peacefully in her bassinet surrounded by an ethereal blue light while the phototherapy unit gently hums on the floor below her. We had a pediatrician appointment today and were told we still need to continue the treatment. They took another blood sample at the lab and we got the results earlier tonight: her level is now down to 12 so clearly things have improved. We’ll be talking to the pediatrician again tomorrow morning and hopefully she’ll say we can retire the glow worm machine post haste.
So Jaundice is not terribly serious but not much fun either. I mean, you wouldn’t want to name your kid Jaundice or anything right? Well, believe it or not, for one unfortunate little girl, that’s exactly the name she was given. Many years ago my sister-in-law Loraine was teaching first grade in a low-income school district in Hayward, California. The company I was working for was replacing some PCs and I convinced them to donate the old computers to Loraine’s school. I dropped the computers off one afternoon and as I was transferring them into her classroom I stopped to look at some of the students’ artwork which was posted on the walls. While looking at one particular finger painting I happened to catch the student’s name scrawled in the corner. Not quite believing that I’d read it correctly, I asked Loraine “does this really say Jaundice?” Amazingly, some extremely ignorant or misguided parents had really named their daughter Jaundice. Unfortunately, Loraine left teaching not long after this so she never got a chance to meet Jaundice’s younger siblings, Anemia and Rickets.
So thankfully Chelsea just has a temporary yellowing of the skin which she will never remember, as opposed to being afflicted with the name of her condition for the rest of her life. So we’ve got that going for us, which is nice.
