Baby Sunglasses

So today in pathology we learned about my favorite organ, the liver. But sometimes baby livers don't work as well as they should, and so babies are born with jaundice of the newborn (which sounds a lot better than hemolytic disease of the newborn but what do I know about newborns as a barren 23 year old?). Regardless, our professor was explaining that one of her children had this condition fresh out the womb, and they had to keep it overnight at the hospital in a light box*, and it was apparently incredibly traumatic for her. I suppose I can understand her emotional trauma. You're technically supposed to bond with your baby like, as soon as it's born, so to have it in a plastic box would kind of put me on edge. What if the baby ends up liking UV rays more than mommy? And as a young adult in college it gets more oxytocin visiting tanning salons than calling its own mother? Then it probably gets skin cancer (because it's probably white) because it can't stay away from L.A. Tan. #whitepeopleproblems

MY experience with jaundice of the newborn is much more amusing. I was beyond excited/curious during the gestation of my little sister, Erisa. One of my earliest memories is tapping on my mom's stomach to assess whether or not it actually contained a human or if my mom was just being lazy and taking weeks off of work to lie in bed. Regardless, when my baby sister Erisa was born she had a little jaundice. But we got to take her home, and so in the yellow walls of our home's nursery, I got to observe my little sister converting unconjugated bilirubin to photobilirubin while wearing super cool little baby sunglasses that I was hella jealous of. And so began my love/annoyance with my little sister. And my appreciation of cool shades.


*Why would you ever put a newborn in a light box?: You put babies with too much bilirubin/jaundice in light boxes because it converts the insoluble bilirubin into photobilirubin which is soluble and can be excreted in the urine. A lot of bad things can happen if you let bilirubin build up in a newborn, but by far the worst is kernicterus, which is a condition that damages the brain.