As I continue the story of Henry’s birth and our new life as NICU parents, I’m sitting at my dining room table looking out onto a delightfully rainy day. I like the dreary days sometimes. You need them. They are cozy.
Though I love summer days as well, we spent most of our hot Roseville summer days in an air-conditioned hospital. Life in a hospital is like pressing the pause button on regular life. Everything else just stops or it seems non-existent. Your normal daily habits disappear and new ones take their place. There is no taking out the garbage or emptying the dishwasher. There is no doing your hair or making sure you put mascara on before you leave the house. There is no Sunday morning church or going over the grandparent’s house for dinner. Everything just gets put on hold and you don’t know for how long. Even the warm days of summer couldn’t penetrate the walls of this new world we found ourselves in.
When I woke up after surgery, the first thing I remember was… I am in a lot of pain! I didn’t feel this pain with Lily after her c-section! Because of Henry’s rushed entrance into this world, they didn’t have time to give me a spinal. All I will say about this is the pain was almost unbearable. It took a while; but once they gave me the little device where I could push the magic button and administer my own meds I was very thankful. I would have done a happy dance if I could have.
We figured out later that before Andy had even left Santa Rosa, Henry had been born. So when I woke up from surgery Andy hadn’t arrived yet even though he had driven at break-neck speed ( 85 mph to be exact) to get there. I was so relieved to see him when he did come. Chris, Andy’s dad, had been following behind him. So when Andy went to the NICU to see Henry, Chris stayed with me. It was so nice to have my family around me.
It’s hard to explain what it felt like to see Henry for the first time. It was very surreal and honestly, at four months later, a little blurry around the edges. They wheeled me downstairs to the NICU and into one of the 8 NICU rooms. Each room had 4 -6 babies in them. Some of the babies were in isolets, or space pods as Andy and I called them, and some babies were in open cribs. I don’t clearly remember exactly what I thought at that moment. It just hadn’t quite sunk in that he was was in this little plastic cage and not in my arms. He had so many tubes and Iv’s and cords attached to him. I could barely see his face because of the tube giving him oxygen and the tube that was taped to his cheek giving him food through his nose. I felt like I was in a movie. It didn’t seem real. But there he was, my little boy. And I was just so relieved that he was there, small… so small; but doing well.
Henry in is Isolet
Every three hours was the babies’ “care time”. This consisted of temperature check, diaper change and feeding. Parents were encouraged to do this when they came to the NICU. Andy and I could do everything but the feeding at that point. When he eventually started taking a bottle, we could feed him. We were encouraged to do skin to skin with Henry, or Kangaroo Care. Andy would take off his shirt and just hold Henry to his chest. I would just stick Henry down the from of my shirt! During this time, Henry slept A LOT! He was barely ever awake. But I knew that he knew our voices and smell even if he never opened his eyes during a visit.
We lived our life in increments of 3 hours. Every three hours (except during the night), we tried to come to his room, be with him and I would pump. It was exhausting. And I was very emotional. I cried all the time and once I started I just couldn’t stop.
I won’t lie. I loved seeing Henry and being with him. Each day my love for him just swelled up within me more and more. But this was not always a happy time. It seemed like there was no end in sight to this tiring routine. I was waking up during the night to pump and still recovering from surgery. And to top it all off, I got an infection and came down with a fever of 103 degrees the day after I had Henry. They had to put me on antibiotics until the fever went away. I was in the hospital for a whole week after Henry was born because of the fever.
There were many many moments when I thought I could not endure or that I physically and mentally did not have the strength to deal. God gave me many things to weather this time. First, I know there were many prayers being offered up for our family. Next, there was Lily. She was mine and Andy’s comic relief during this time. Her cheerful disposition and hilarious humor kept us smiling between the tears. She became quite a pro at choosing the right buttons on the elevators. We also had visitors (which I’ll touch on in the next post) from home. This was such an amazing encouragement. Last of all, but not the least by any means, God gave me my rock, Andy. He was and is my calm. He’s solid and steady and so strong. I don’t know what I would have done without him by side. He’s my perfect partner.
We are just a week from Thanksgiving and Lily and I have been talking about things that we can be thankful to God for. I can truly say that I am thankful for this experience. It taught me so much about leaning on God, about seeing how God gives us strength just for the day, sometimes just for the moment. Seeing just a little more clearly who my God is, though the lessons were hard, was and is a great gift.
Skin to Skin
Care Time
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