NICU – Part 3

Hi Everybody. I know it’s been a while. Writing that last post took a lot out of me and I’ve felt a little drained. But yesterday was Mother’s Day and I know I needed to continue this chapter of our life.

After I stood there for about five minutes sobbing, I immediately went into survival mode. I needed my husband. He was my lifeline. He was my rock. I left the NICU to call him in the NICU waiting room. He immediately left work and sped down to the hospital to join his father and myself. He wanted to hear it all from the doctor himself. He wanted to be able to process it firsthand from the staff. When he arrived, he went back into the NICU and he told our son’s nurse that he would like to speak to the doctor about our son’s condition. Within a few minutes, an intern emerged, not the neonatologist on for the day. The intern proceeded to tell my husband that the neonatologist was not going to be able to come out to talk to him and that there really isn’t any information that they can give us until the head radiologist does a thorough evaluation of the ultrasound scans. He told us at that time, our son’s head neonatologist would request a meeting with us to review the scans. My husband was furious that such a serious problem that a family needed to ask questions about had to be answered by an intern who, himself, was not very knowledgeable about the situation.

While all of this was going on, I remember sitting in a rocking chair next to our baby’s isolette. He looks so perfect. So beautiful. He looked just like my husband’s baby pictures. He had been the strong one that had been sitting on my cervix and caused so much of my preterm labor. He had wanted out so bad. He looked like such an angel all curled up in his isolette. He was nice and warm and content. It seemed so unreasonable that he had such horrific damage done on the inside of his head. I remember that I kept looking at his head. I became fixed on it. I was looking for any sign that might show that it was there. I felt like if I couldn’t see it, then maybe it wasn’t true. Maybe it was another baby’s scan and it had just gotten mixed up somehow.

After a few hours, I started to go numb. I realized that this was real. It was not a joke. It was really happening. Then, I started to shut down. I had been in tremendous pain from the c-section and had been doing way to much walking around. I’m sure that the stress also contributed to my health that day as well. I went to the bathroom and discovered extremely large clots being passed. Some where even the size of golf balls. I knew that this probably was not a good thing. But I was turning myself off from reality. I couldn’t deal with it. My husband drove me home and I remember just walking through the door and going straight to the bedroom downstairs that I had been sleeping in the night before. I laid down and just froze. My husband says that I just stared out in space. I felt like I just had to run. I was running away in my head. If I ran away, then everything that was happening with our precious boy, would go away. I was like a zombie. No emotion. No speech. No life. I felt dead. I know that this isn’t rational thinking. But it was the coping mechanism that I felt like I needed. I had been through so much in the last 6 years. I couldn’t believe that this was really happening.

My husband knew that I was shutting down. He sat down on the bed next to me and kept saying my name trying to get me to respond. He kept saying it over and over. Then he kept saying, “Please don’t do this. I need you. The babies need you. I can’t do this without you. You have to be strong. You have to be brave. Everything is going to be okay.”

What? How can I be strong anymore? I felt like I had been run over by a big rig truck with everything I had gone through. My body was numb. My mind was numb. I just wanted to curl up in a ball and run from it all. I didn’t want to have to feel. At least for a little while. Didn’t I deserve that? Wasn’t that understandable?

But my husband needed me too. It wasn’t fair to him. He needed support just as much as I did. He had been the rock and positive one for the last 9 weeks. Now he was feeling the weight of it all as well. We needed to be there for each other. We needed to be the team we had always been in our relationship. I sat up in bed and put my arms around him. We just sat there crying on each others shoulder for quite some time. We vowed to be strong for our son. Strong for all our little men and strong for each other. We would have to wait for 3 days now for the ultrasound reviews. THREE DAYS! It felt like an eternity.