One Month

Here is Miss Maggie at approximately one month. When I took her in for her 4 week visit, they told me she still had significant Jaundice and they needed to figure out why. It turns out that often there is a protein in the mother's milk that can cause some baby's intestines to keep reabsorbing the Billirubin instead of expelling it. Some babies are just particularly sensitive to it. The good news is it is self limiting, so there is no cause for concern, because the Billirubrn levels stay at a pretty moderate level and then eventually go down. The bad news is, the only way to verify that it is breast milk jaundice is to do a heel prick then stop nursing for three days and repeat the test to see if her levels dropped. We began this process at 6 am on her 1 month birthday, so she spent the majority of the day crying for food and refusing the bottle.... Luckily, that is all it was and she was able to resume nursing without any other concerns. Amazingly, the Jaundice never really came back even when she returned to breast milk.