To be more specific I hate the night of January 22. Tonight is the 6th anniversary of the night before my daughter was born.
I was in the hospital with a pregnancy that statistically should already have failed. I had been given a tour of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), met with the head neonatologist and been given the kind of statistics that are so bad you can't even process them 6 years later. My amniotic fluid was dropping, my blood pressure was starting to spike, I had absent end flow in my left uterine artery and given the room for error in the ultrasounds we didn't even know if she was big enough for the resuscitation threshold.
That's a thing. The Resuscitation Threshold. Who knew? It's 500 grams, if your RT has a tube small enough on hand.
If she was big enough, they could resuscitate and then feed her intravenously and hope that she continued to grow. Not too fast and not too slow. Too fast and bad things happen; too slow and bad things happen: brain haemorrhages, necrotizing enterocolitis, heart murmurs, retinopathy of prematurity (which can lead to blindness), not to mention cerebral palsy and hosts other things I have blocked from my memory.
Back to tonight. I was lying in a hospital bed, hooked up to a fetal monitor, my husband asleep on the very uncomfortable cot beside me snoring. All I could do was watch the monitor. Every blip meant that she was still alive.
I was awash in guilt and despair. I couldn't even manage to be pregnant, how could I be a mom? How could I be a mom to a sick baby? a special needs baby? any baby?
Nurses kept coming in and telling me to go to sleep and finally got an order for Ativan. That did not work. Despair wins every time.
By the time morning rolled around I was so tired and scared I was a zombie. When she was delivered - 4:42 pm, January 23, 2007, 1 lb 8 oz - I am not sure I even knew my own name. Then Debbie the scrub nurse showed me the top of a teeny tiny head the same size as my fist. She asked me what the baby's name was. I said Charlotte Evelyn.
I held her for the first time when she was 5 days old for about 15 minutes. I held her again 7 days later. February 18th she joined "The Kilo Club" and February 19th we had a meeting with the Dr. who told me that I would probably take a baby home. It took 98 days but we did, on April 30th.
We are so lucky and so fortunate that, knock wood, we have not had any serious on-going side-effects from the prematurity and lots of therapy has almost convinced me it's not my fault. But that does not mean the despair doesn't come to visit every now and then. Especially tonight.
If you'll excuse me I need to go and do my nightly check to make sure everyone's still breathing.
Because I'm a mom. A good one.
