NICU Life…
Our NICU stay was around 6/7 weeks between two hospitals. Looking back now I think of it with a certain fondness, which I never thought would happen. At the time I didn’t want to be there I just wanted Amelia home. I suppose it was the first few weeks of Amelia’s life, of us having another child. Those precious moments where most people are at home except we were in the hospital. The weekly milestone cards were in the incubator, the teddies were resting against the cubicle, the nappies and feeding syringes were in a sterile cabinet. Everyone who helped Amelia almost became like a weird family, there are certain people that really got us through those hard weeks.
One of the things I found hardest was not being able to just pick Amelia up whenever I wanted, there was always loads of wires wrapped around her and beeps going off for her heart rate and stats (you strangely get used to the sound of beeps and I found it quite therapeutic) you always look for the nurse to sort of give you the ok. Its like your baby isn’t your baby, I felt like I needed permission to get her out. The nurses in no way made me feel like that, its just a feeling that I cant really explain. I felt robbed of that new-born stage, the endless cuddles in bed and breastfeeding or bottle feeding, staying up and watching random box sets to make sure you stay awake. Staring at your baby and not sleeping because you just want to take them all in (and make sure they are breathing). All of this didn’t happen and we had a new normal.
Driving to the hospital every day, walking past parents taking their babies home, or seeing pregnant women excited for their scans, (that was hard to see). No one knew I had just had a baby and she was upstairs, to anyone else we could have been anything. The same routine, in the lift, wash hands, buzz for NICU, say hello to the receptionist, go to the room, wash hands again. Then just wait to see what was going on, what tests they were doing today, results, more poking and prodding. Its so hard to watch your baby go through all of this, nothing can prepare you for it. I remember when Amelia had her second MRI (her first was with me pregnant) she was a week old and was put in this giant incubator and taken down, she just looked so small and innocent, I just wanted to rescue her I’m her mother I should be protecting her but I couldn’t.
We had (and still have) an amazing consultant who made us feel human when we first met him. He was very calm and honest and took us through all of Amelia’s problems and how they would be going forward in the next few days. For the first time we had a calm understanding of what was going on. He apologised on behalf of our care during pregnancy and foetal medicine. We should never have been told that everything was fine, he told us we should have been told everything is clear at the moment but further testing will be needed once she was here. This is what we found so hard to understand, we had had all the testing available to us whilst I was pregnant and still nothing came up. We must have looked like rabbits caught in headlights, just trying to hope for any positive outcome.
At the time I couldn’t see anything but darkness, everywhere I went felt like a dark cloud was always there. It was nearly Christmas but I couldn’t get excited, I had so much planned for the girls first Christmas together but that was gone. I never thought I would be happy again, I couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.
It DOES get better you don’t really realise until you look back, even if I could talk to myself at that stage I still wouldn’t have listened. You get there at your own pace and when you are ready to go back to those dark moments you realise how far you really have come.