The 3 A.M. Chat That Caught His Jaundice
2026-04-19 · Warren, founder of Hey Susan · 4 min
This is a personal story, not medical advice. Jaundice looks different from baby to baby, and what happened to our son is not a guide for what will happen to yours. If any of this sounds like your situation, please call your pediatrician or nurse hotline, not a blog post. They'd much rather take a "false alarm" call at 2 a.m. than miss a real one.
We were discharged from the hospital on day 3, and he was a "good baby" those first days. Slept a lot, nursed but not for long, fewer diapers than the books suggested. No one told us at discharge — not our pediatrician, not the nurses — to watch for yellowing skin. We were watching anyway, on instinct, and by day 4 he was noticeably more yellow. At 3 a.m. that night, under nursery light, with a baby in a yellow swaddle, everything looked a little yellow and a little fine.
So at 3 a.m. we did what a lot of exhausted parents do: we described what we were seeing to an AI chatbot, not sure who else to call at that hour. It flagged the pattern as jaundice and told us to get him checked. We didn't do anything about it until the morning, when we woke up around 6 or 7 and it was obvious: that's definitely not normal. We brought him in that day — day 4 — and an emergency nurse at the hospital confirmed it looked like jaundice, and his bilirubin was high enough that he was admitted for phototherapy, about 12 hours under the blue-spectrum bili light that helps a newborn's body break bilirubin down through the skin. We shared the hospital room with another family for the stay, which is its own special kind of tired.
He was fine, the nurses had seen it a thousand times, but I sat in that hospital chair and realized nobody had actually verified he was getting enough to eat. Everyone kept telling us colostrum and early breastfeeding should be enough, and nurses would watch him nurse and say it looked fine, but nobody could actually tell us if he was getting enough volume. It took a nurse on that phototherapy shift, who mentioned she used to work at a hospital in Australia, to say the thing nobody else had: feed him more, and if he's not getting enough from breastfeeding, supplement with formula. I don't think anyone before her was wrong to encourage breastfeeding, but I think a lot of the earlier advice we got was quietly reluctant to be the one to suggest formula, and that gap was part of why it got as bad as it did before anyone said the obvious thing out loud.
Jaundice is a yellow tint to a baby's skin and eyes caused by bilirubin, a pigment that builds up in the first days of life while a newborn's liver is still learning to clear it. It typically shows up first on the face and moves down toward the chest, belly, and legs as it gets more pronounced, and it leaves the body through stool, which is why feeding and diaper output matter so much. A baby who isn't eating much isn't pooping much, and a baby who isn't pooping is recirculating the bilirubin instead of clearing it.
The signs we didn't know to watch for: a baby who is "too good," meaning too sleepy to wake for feeds, a weak latch or short nursing sessions, fewer wet and dirty diapers than expected for the baby's age in days, and yellow that reaches below the chest or into the palms and soles. Most pediatric offices want that same-day call if you see any of that, or if the yellow shows up in the first 24 hours or gets worse after day 3. A newborn under 3 months old with a fever over 100.4°F is always an ER trip, jaundice or not.
Most jaundice is mild and resolves on its own as the baby eats, poops, and grows, which is exactly what happened to our son after about 12 hours under the lights. That's also exactly why it's worth taking seriously early rather than assuming a sleepy baby is just a good sleeper. Your pediatrician is the one who can tell you where your baby falls on that spectrum, not me.
I built Hey Susan for a lot of reasons, but this is one of the honest ones. The only reason we caught it in time was a 3 a.m. chat with a bot that didn't even remember our baby between sessions. It's kind of ridiculous that there wasn't already a tool that could have helped us in that moment, and honestly, what's out there still can't do it. We needed something more proactive — able to actually look at the situation with us, not give medical advice, but nudge us to check in with our nurse or pediatrician earlier, ask the harder questions, give us more information before we had to go looking for it ourselves.
That's part of why Susan tracks things like diaper output in the background. If the wet and dirty counts start slipping the way his did, she'll nudge you to check in with your pediatrician instead of leaving you to notice it alone at 3 a.m. the way we did. She's not a doctor and she won't diagnose anything. She's just the assistant who's up when you are.
If you want that same tracking for your own kid, you can see what Hey Susan's Keepsakes and the rest of Susan — Max Performance include at heysusan.app/#pricing. Susan is live on iPhone and Android, and she's free for early users.
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