Lemon drop

This morning, at our latest check-up, a lady asked me if Oscar's father was Chinese. I guess he still has jaundice then...

It started at the five-day check-up, when we found out that Oscar's skin was above the normal levels of neonatal yellow. Basically, babies are born with more red cells than they need, and often their livers aren't producing enough bilurubin to metabolise them. I just thought our boy was golden, turns out he was ill.

When the nurse told me, I was non-plussed as I knew that it was a condition that affects about 40 per cent of babies born in Hong Kong, but then she abandoned the usual hospital robot talk for a second and said "I'm sorry, I know this must be hard for you..."

I hadn't even considered it until then, but in that moment I realised that I was about to be separated from my child for the first time in nine months.

Then I experienced a minor version of the baby blues. All of the emotion of the past few days (and months) came pouring out of my body, and I cried for three days in a row, while Oscar got a tan in his incubator. I felt guilty crying so much in a hospital unit full of babies with tubes coming out of their noses, mouths and hands while all my baby was doing was getting a sun tan, but I couldn't control myself.

Those nights, I had a recurring dream about sprinklers bursting with urine, worried as I was about Oscar's peeing – frequent urination was the only way we could be sure he was evacuating the bilurubin from his system.

In fact I became obsessed with urine and faeces. Or to use the more medically accurate terms employed by the hospital – peepee and poopoo (it is so hard to keep a straight face when a doctor is asking you how many poopoos there have been...).

And because the incubator was so hot, every time I fed the baby I had to get him naked to cool him down and wake him up, much to the disarray of the nurses, who are advocates of layering and swaddling babies, not understanding my need to expose Oscar every time I came in. He brought the habit home for a while, too, making me look like a crazy woman every time I fed him. But if he didn't wake up, he didn't eat, and if he didn't eat he didn't pee, and if he didn't pee, he had jaundice.

I do worry that his stay on the tanning bed and his need to be naked have turned him into a nudist sunbather for the rest of his life, though...