Has it really been two and a half weeks? Not just one never ending day? I feel like I’m living life in fast forward and slow motion at the same time.
Thank you all so much for all the comments and emails and phone calls and flowers and presents. I just can’t believe the outpouring. I especially appreciate the new people I haven’t met before popping out of the woodwork to cheer me on. I’ve had some pretty terrible internet experiences, but this has been one of the most beautiful things in my life.
Oh for crying out loud, there’s so much to tell.
Atticus is doing OK. Better, actually, but just for today I’m depressed and gloomy. He’s still on the ventilator, but he just can’t seem to make it that next step. They took him off once, and then two days later they had to put him back on because his lung wasn’t inflating all the way. Then his lung decided to cooperate, but they wanted to keep him on it so he could use his energy for growing and putting on weight instead of working hard to breath. After a couple days of this he just got sick of the thing and yanked it out himself. Again, he made it two days on his own and then last night, minutes before we showed up for our visit, they put him back on the ventilator because he tired himself out.
I’ve been doing surprisingly well. I keep asking myself, how do I not have post partum depression? For one thing, I had all the risk factors, and for another, I went into the doctor’s office for what we thought were gall stones and ended up being strapped to a table while my baby was torn from my womb three months early and kidnapped to the NICU while I nearly died. Please understand I’m not trying to say the medical team did anything but give us both the best quality of care, I’m just trying to illustrate that the whole thing has been pretty darn traumatic. And until today, I’ve been pretty much OK about the whole thing.
Today, I’m depressed. And incredibly sad. And guilty. And frustrated. And feeling torn in so many directions I feel schizophrenic.
Sunday I suggested we not go down to the hospital so we could have a day to get caught up around the house. I was sobbing the whole time I was suggesting it, feeling like a terrible neglectful mother, but I just felt like we needed it. Then I start feeling funky. My skin feels sensitive, my joints hurt, I have a massive headache and then I start shaking uncontrollably and my milk production slows to a trickle. We hadn’t been grocery shopping since Atticus was born, so we were completely out of drinks. Since I really hadn’t been drinking all day and yet I was still pumping every three hours, we assumed I was massively dehydrated. Bear ran to the grocery store to go get me drinks, I guzzled two bottles of water, and went to sleep. Monday I wake up and it’s more of the same. I’m pushing liquids until I’m peeing water, and nothing changes. Bear gets home, takes one look at me and freaks out. I was shivering, my lips were blue, I was miserable. He calls his dad the doctor who says that I’ve caught some super nasty aggressive strain of the flu that’s going around that operates in cycles. First it lowers your body temperature, then you get a fever for several hours, then your temperature crashes again. All of this means that I can’t go see my baby.
By Wednesday it had all pretty much cleared up. The flu also gave me this crazy rash that covered like 70% of my body, and by the time I woke up that had pretty much disappeared as well, but the preemies are so fragile – and the flu is the absolute worst thing for them to be exposed to, so I figured it would be best if I took one last day to make sure everything was completely out of my system.
And, I was also kind of enjoying my break. As much as I missed my baby, it was kind of nice to be able to rest and work on getting pumping the breastmilk down without also driving two hours to spend an hour where all I could do was look at my baby in a big plastic box and put my hand on his back. And try to stay out of the nurses way. It was nice to have an irrefutable excuse that I wasn’t being a horrible neglectful selfish mother by taking some time to recover.
Yesterday driving down to see him was all I could think about. In between pumpings I spent my day running to the library to pick up books on preemies and making him a fancy little nametag for his isolette. Once Bear got home we raced down to get to him like it we were on the Price is Right, and when we walked into the NICU we saw his little bed surrounded by nurses, the doctor, and the respiratory therapist. The doctor explained to us that they just finished putting him back on the ventilator, and it was all I could do to not collapse to the floor screaming.
I know he’s not dying. I know it’s just a matter of time. Every sign points towards him making it out of here eventually and being just fine. But when he’s on the ventilator, I can’t hold him. I hadn’t even been able to see him for five days, and because I took that extra day off, I missed my window. If I had gone to see him Wednesday night, I could have held him and rocked him and kissed his fuzzy head. Instead, I got an hour with my hand on his head, and then I had to stop before he got overstimulated.
In my defense, we had no idea he was off the ventilator until after 9pm Wednesday night since the phone call to inform us got neglected because that was also the first day the nurses had to go paperless and they were all struggling to keep up with their duties while managing a new computer system. But like rational arguments make any difference to me now? I also recognize that it was the healthy thing to do to make sure the virus had completely run it’s course. But do you think that matters one iota to me now that I know I could have held my baby?
I just don’t think there’s anything I can do to make me feel like I’m doing things right. Whenever I’m not with him, I feel like an unnatural mother. Like I’m neglecting my poor tiny son when he needs his mom the most. But when I am with him, I’m blindingly aware of the fact that for this very moment, I’m not who he needs the most. Right now the nurses can do more for him than I can, and if I spend more than an hour at a time with him, I’m really just getting in their way. Once he’s off the ventilator and I can hold him and we can start working on breastfeeding, that won’t be the case anymore, but for right now I am largely impotent, and that makes me so frustrated all I can do is cry.