Newborn 1 Week Checkup: Fill & Download for Free

My daughters’ pediatrician decreed that my twins, who were born 3-1/2 weeks early, should be fed every 2 hours round the clock at least for the first 6 weeks. I did so. They thrived. But the only thing I really remember of that time period is how incredibly tired I was.On the other hand, I fed my son on demand and he was sleeping through the night before his 6 week checkup.My daughters didn't sleep through the night until they were at least 6 months old.

My daughter passed away on Jan 3rd 2017 after 38 weeks of pregnancy.My wife and I had everything ready to go to the hospital, both their bags ready at the door to go to the hospital. The last visit to the gynecologist, which was only 2 days before my daughter died, everything was perfectly ok. The gynaecologist told us to get ready for delivering, it could be any minute now. She would no longer be considered premature.Everything in house was ready to welcome the newly born for which we were waiting for such a long time.But in the middle of the night, my wife woke me up to tell me she was worried. She hasn’t felt our baby move for a couple of hours. I told her not to worry because we felt her move just the day before.But just to be sure I took the doppler we have at home. As I had done a hundred times before, I started looking for the heart beat. Normally I find the heartbeat in a few seconds. It’s very easy at 38 weeks, especially if you’ve been doing every evening for a while. But that night, I couldn’t find anything. I kept looking for a few minutes, but then urged my wife to get dressed and we drove to the hospital.In the hospital they could only confirm what we already knew.My daughter died.The evening before we went to bed, looking forward to having our daughter. That morning our dreams were shattered.It was all very unreal, we were sitting in a hospital bed at 4am, in the dim light. Both my wife and I not really realising what just happened. The full pain of what we were just told took a while to sink in.I called my parents, parent-in-law, my daughter's godmother and godfather to inform them.My mom was on a trip 160km away when I called her out of bed at 5 in the morning. She packed her bags immediately and drove directly to the hospital and stayed to support us for the next three days.My mother-in-law that lives 15.000km away, was staying at our place. She had taken a flight two weeks earlier to be there for her daughter when her first grandchild would be born. After we got the bad news, and shed our first tears of many I drove home to get her her and to bring her to her her daughter, my wife. She also didn’t leave our sides for the next three days.So there we were in the hospital, my wife and me, my mom and my mother-in-law, preparing for the saddest experience of our lives.My wife had to give birth the natural normal way, except that now she did not have a happy ending to look forward to. She experienced all of the pain, and had none of the joy. She was induced at 9 in the morning of our first day in the hospital, and she delivered at 9:37 the next day.She had it hard, my poor wife. She had 24 hours of labor. She reacted very badly to the drugs they gave her to induce labor. Her epidural malfunctioned halfway through the labor, and it took the anesthesiologist 3 hours to figure out what went wrong and to decide to put a new one.She lost such an amount of blood after the parting that the midwife looked a bit scared. At that moment I was very afraid of losing my wife as well. To stop the bleeding she had to take 10 times the dose of the same drugs that induce the labor, and to which she had the bad reaction.We got to see our daughter, for which we are grateful. We got to see and hold her. The next two days we had a lot of opportunity to hold her, to take picture with her. We have lots of pictures. Both her grandmothers were able to see her. Both her godmother as godfather got to see her.After the delivery they asked us for consent for an autopsy. We were a bit scared for giving it, because we were told it was not certain that we would be able to see our daughter after the autopsy. It appears that an autopsy is not always successful on a baby that small.They took a biopsy from the placenta and from my daughter and sent it to the laboratory for chromosome/DNA research.They took blood from me, my wife, my daughter and the umbilical cord, to run some more tests.We got the results in just last week.And they found nothing. Nothing that could give any explanation to why my daughter died right before she was due in this world.My wife was not drinking alcohol or doing drugs. My wife was eating healthy as she always does. She was reading books about healthy food during pregnancy and we made food together accordingly. She read every book about pregnancy and how to make sure you do what is best for your unborn child. But it all didn’t help, she left us anyway.So to answer your question, at least in our case, they have no idea. I’ve been told it happens a lot, that here in Europe, 1 in 200 children pass away like this.It all seems very easy and natural, getting pregnant and delivering a baby. People have been doing it for as long as we exist as a species, so I can’t be that hard you would think.Once you are past the 3 month mark, everybody assumes you’re home free, you just need to wait out the last months and then you give birth and you come home with a pretty little baby. But the reality is, unfortunately, very different.We came home empty handed. I had to carry my wife from the hospital to the car, and from the car to the house. She couldn’t stand on her legs. This was not what we were expecting. This was not where we have been living towards in the last 9 months.My wife and I will never know how our daughter laughs and cries. And we have mourned for that every day since. And we will mourn for that for the rest of our lives.We try to look to the future though, and prepare ourselves for getting pregnant again one day.I heard people complaining in the past about their newborns. They were complaining about lack of sleep, too much crying in the middle of the night. Getting up to feed the baby. Exchanging dirty stinky diapers. The baby throwing upI would gladly give everything I have to experience that. I know for sure that I will not be a complaining when we have our next baby. I will be grateful and happy everytime she cries, because then I will know she lives and breathes. I will be happy everytime I exchange a dirty diaper because then I will know that she eats well and is healthy. I would not be able to care less if she pukes all over me on the most inconvenient time ever.For everybody who reads this who has children, cherish them, take care of them, as you are the lucky ones who made it to this world.(Edit 2017–04–17: expanded a bit)Edit (2017–06-01):Thanks to everybody for giving us so much support in these difficult times. It is heart warming to see much people reacting to this answer.I have very good news to share, and I also wanted to share this news with the people reading this answer.The great news is that my wife is pregnant again. It’s very early, she is only 9 weeks now. We have had our first visit to the gynaecologist just last week and up to now everything looks perfect!We have had our difficult moments since we got to know that we are pregnant again, we had a lot of mixed emotions. Being very happy that we can start over again, but also being very afraid of what is coming the coming months.What is very is doing things for the first time again. Going to the gynaecologist for the first time, going to the childcare to reinscribe, …I’m very happy that we can start over again! But the next months will be stressful for the both of us, and we will only be reassured when the next 6–7 months are passed and we can hold our baby in our arms!Edit (2017–10–05)Thanks again to everybody for their support and good wishes for the future. As several people requested in the comment, I’m giving an update to our next pregnancy.At the moment of writing we are 26 weeks far! 6 weeks ago we had an extensive echo and everything looks as normal. All values within average ranges.We are followed up much more closely, so we’ve been two more times at the gynecologist's office for checkups.I must say we are much more careful and aware now than we were last time. we are checking each and every night the heartbeat of our son. Every few hours I’m asking “Did he move recently?”, I’m happy that my wife does not get completely annoyed by that.We are realizing we are going towards the end of the pregnancy, which is both scary and a relief. Personally I’m more looking forward to it. My wife is a bit more scared for what is coming. The thought of having to go back to the hospital, to the same room will be hard. Just like everything is very hard to do for the first time again.I’m happy that the people of the maternity ward of our hospital are such amazing people, I’m sure they will support us and help us get through the difficult times that are coming.Edit (2017–11–09)As I promised several people in the comments, I’m updating my answer to give an update on the pregnancy. I guess this is relevant to the answer as well as it gives an idea how we are handling the loss of our daughter with the new pregnancy underway.I’m happy to say that the pregnancy up till now is progressing without any issues. We are now in week 31 and we are going to the gynaecologist every other week for an echo and everything looks good on the echo.Last visit, our gynaecologist recommended us to go to the hospital every week to have an fetal monitoring done. We do this every evening with a home doppler, but with the monitoring hardware from the hospital, they monitor for half an hour. This gives a good view of the heartbeat of our son for a longer period. This gives us peace of mind that our son is still doing fine.It was hard on my wife to go back to the hospital, going back to the place where it all went wrong. Especially because the room where the monitoring is done, is across the hall from where we were last time.Last pregnancy we were lying in a hospital room, and across the hallway we heard the fetal heartbeats of people who still had a living child. And we were lying in our room, waiting to deliver our daughter without a heartbeat.And now we were lying on the other side, in one bed between the other mothers who came for a monitoring session. This time we are one of the lucky ones. I hope we can hold on to that luck!My wife is having a hard time at the moment. She is having nightmare, which is obviously completely normal for the given circumstances. I try to comfort her as much as I can, and distract her as much as I can and just hope that this period of waiting goes by as quickly as possible! I think she is not so much scared of the delivery on itself, because she knows what is coming. But I think she is scared of having to go through the same as last time.I’m sure this fear will stay on us until the moment we are actually in the hospital delivering.Edit (2017–12–11)We are now in our last week! If everything stays normal, my wife will be induced next Tuesday. We are going to the gynaecologist every week for a checkup, and besides that we have an appointment in the hospital every other day to monitor the heart tones. All these checks could not have prevented what happened before, but they give us peace of mind now. Up to now everything looks good. Tonight we have the last appointment with the gynaecologist before the birth!The past weeks were heavy on my wife. She had a few moment where she didn’t feel the movements of our son anymore. Of course she panicked completely. We were not home, so we were not in the possibility of checking the heartbeat immediately with our doppler, so we drove to the hospital immediately. But luckily everything was ok. The position of our baby and the position of the placenta just caused my wife not to feel the movements, but they were definitely there, we saw them on the echo.We are looking forward enormously to the birth of our son and the moment that we can hold him in our arms. Like Chivon says in the comments, it feels like everything will be ok once he is born. It feels like his birth is going to fix everything. But we have to watch out for post partum anxiety. Thanks Chivon for pointing that out!I hope I will be able to share good news next week!Update (2017–12–28)I am happy to share the news that my son is born perfectly healthy on December 19th.It was heavy on my wife being induced on that Tuesday morning. We thought a lot of our daughter a lot during those hours of labor. We endured lots of fears during the whole pregnancy but also during labor and delivery. We were not ready to accept we made it to the finish until we would here our son cry!Especially sat the end of labor, there were some problems with his heart rate, it would not come down between contractions as it should. So all of sudden my wife had an internal monitor placed, a midwife present reading the monitor constantly. I would see the heartbeat staying at 150+ bpm constantly, with an occasional drop to 70. To be honest, I thought we were going to lose him right there.Because of the heartbeat, the gynaecologist decided together with us that a caesarean would be the safest option giving the curcumstances. She was going to prep the operating room while the midwifes prepared my wife in the delivery room. I don’t know why, but the midwife checked the opening one last time and noticed enough opening to start pushing. So the gynaecologist is pulled back from the OR and my wife could deliver our son in 3 pushes, amazing!The last days have been heavy, thinking of our daughter a lot, how it should have been with her. But we enjoy every moment with our son! When he wakes me up in the middle of the night, I’m happy he can! When I have to change a stinky full diaper at 4 in the morning, I’m happy I can. When he needs attention to fall asleep at night, I’m happy to give that to him!

First, some abbreviations:LMP: Last Menstrual Period. The last menses a woman has before her pregnancy. Gestational age is measured from this date.WGA: Weeks Gestational Age. How far along the mother is in her pregnancy.PDD: Post-Delivery Date. The number of days after delivery.For the average healthy pregnancy, you have the following services:1. Routine visitsLet us suppose women catch their pregnancy 8 weeks after their LMP--they miss their period 4 weeks into their cycle, and then it takes about 4 weeks for them to recognize what's happened, do a home pregnancy test and make an appointment to see an Ob/Gyn.We routinely see women every 4 weeks until 28WGA, every 2 weeks until 36WGA, and every week until delivery, usually at 40WGA. If we include that first visit at 8WGA, then that comes to a total of 14 check-up visits per pregnancy.2. Routine screeningMany specific routine measures are offered during pregnancy. These are often completed during a routine visit. We have:Preliminary bloodwork, including blood type, antibody screening, infective screens for vertically transmitted diseases (rubella, syphilis, measles, HIV, HepB, gonorrhea, chlamydia).Integrated prenatal screening (for Down's syndrome), which consists of an ultrasound and two sets of routine bloodwork to measure AFP, b-hCG, estriol, and inhibin A.Ultrasound for fetal anatomy.Oral glucose challenge test for gestational diabetes.Group B Strep status.3. Labour and deliveryAssuming a 12 hour labor (using Friedman's rather outdated labor curves) and a generous discharge date of PDD#2, we'd have to consider the costs of the obstetrician, the nursing staff, and the medications.4. Extra costsWhile a healthy pregnancy doesn't have any extra costs, we can't avoid the fact that mothers get nervous. So I'll add an extra 2 routine visits to allow for worried mothers looking for some extra information.5. Costs not includedWe have assumed absolutely no complications--pregnancy-induced hypertension, gestational diabetes, pre-eclampsia, small for gestational age, caesarian sections, etc. We've also not factored in the costs associated with the newborn itself (routine screening, newborn checkups, etc.).So, now we need to put some numbers to our bill. I have no reliable source for finding these numbers on the American side, and I imagine the prices are not fixed as they are negotiated between insurance company and health care provider. I've collated information from sketchy websites and journal articles where possible.So what does our bill come to?16 routine visits. $1920 at $120 per visit ((My Obstetrician Costs...ouch [Archive]).Preliminary bloodwork. $180 at $20 a test (HIV and STD Testing).Integrated prenatal screening. $605 (Page on Washington).One additional fetal ultrasound. $325 (Page on Washington).Oral glucose challenge. $7 (Glucose challenge test screening for prediabetes and undiagnosed diabetes).Group B swab. $20 (Saving Babies From Group B Strep).Labour and delivery. $5000 (Elsevier).Total cost of average normal, healthy, uncomplicated delivery? ~$8057.Holding a new baby in your arms? Priceless.