Life is like a coin.

You can spend it any way you wish,

but you only spend it once.

                                    - Lillian Dickson

Just call her Kym. At birth she weighed 2.7 lbs. Her pedia gave her an apgar score of 6-7. He thought that she has choanal atresia. The suction catheter won’t go through her right nosetril. So she was on intubation, oxygen and NGT because she wasn’t allowed to be breastfed for the first 3 days of her life. I suppose this was for further evaluation. And she stayed in the hospital for about a month.

Her pedia, a wise doctor, found out after a week that Kym has signs of Hypothyroidism. She had puffy cheeks and a swollen tongue. She’s like a mini sumo wrestler! Out of that stuffiness, even if she had choanal atresia and infection due to my amniotic fluid leak by PROM, we thought she was healthy. But she was not. She started her thyroid hormone replacement when she was a week old.

After 2 weeks, Kym’s heart rate suddenly dropped from her normal range 120-110bpm to 50bpm. Then it continued dropping fast until she nearly lost her breath. The medical team performed CPR on her till her heart rate returned back to normal. It was a heart-bursting moment to see her like that. I just forced not to break down in tears during that time.

It happened early morning that we found out that her IV wasn’t working. That was supplying her with dextrose and without it, she became hypoglycemic. Due to lack of tests, her Pedia decided to have her for cranial and abdominal ultrasound. T private hospital that Kym was admitted in didn’t have an ultrasound, so we need to transport her to another hospital where an ultrasound test is available. The cranial ultrasound result was normal. The abdominal ultrasound revealed that my daughter has Situs Inversus. First, I was alarmed and worried about the unfamiliar diagnosis she had. But as I researched the word, I was relieved. 
 

At the third week of her hospitalization, her jaundice faded and her skin turned normal; her green stools turned golden yellow; but then, as she first sucked on a bottle, that was the time her Pedia decided that she can go home. Kym was finally discharged from the hospital. 

. . . and her first times at home were not easy for her.