Laith

 It was 24 hours before my induction.  I had been diagnosed with preeclampsia and it was moving toward HELLP syndrome, and it was time to get the baby out. We scheduled the induction for 36 weeks, I had Rowan at 36 weeks as well, so I knew what to expect for a premature baby of that gestational age. Rowan came home 24 hours later. My doctor had talked to me about my son staying for 3 days with me in the post-partum wing.  I could live with that. I spent the entire day before the induction deep cleaning the house and my van…. Truthfully I had been deep cleaning and organizing every corner of my house for months. I like things to be perfect and spotless. I like to feel like every little thing is in its place. This is probably mostly to do with my anxiety and need for control, but also from my childhood which was completely unstable… I have a picture in my mind of the perfect life, the perfect home… everything being beautiful and smelling nice. A stable and warm place to bring a baby home to. I did my nails, my house was perfect, my van was perfect…. Everything like a dream. I left my house smelling like apples and cinnamon the morning of my induction. The trees just beginning to change to their fall colors. What perfection it would be to bring a baby home to this.  I left my husband with instructions of what I hoped he would do in the 3 days I was at the hospital… keep the dogs clean was one of the major ones, keep the house clean was another. Everything was going to be just perfect. The induction was started and I couldn’t have been more excited to meet my baby boy. I opted to have an epidural because I have been induced before and it was too much for my body to handle. This was the first event that would go wrong during my labor. As they injected the first dose of medicine I began to feel numb as you should in your legs. But shortly after I began to have trouble breathing and started seeing spots. I told the nurse that I felt funny, but my tongue was numb and I could barely talk. Within 10 seconds and entire team or nurses, the doctor, and Anesthesiologist were around me, putting ice packs on my body asking how far up I could feel. I couldn’t feel the ice on my neck. They looked panicked, and I asked if I was going to stop breathing. They said they were doing everything they could to prevent that. Something was put in my IV, and within about 30 min I began to get feeling back in my chest. Then the epidural failed, I went from 5 cm to my baby in my arms in 30 minutes. And I experienced for the first time the true feeling of birth. For a moment I thought I might pass out or die from pain, and then just like that, it was over. My son was born. I had done what so many women before me had done. I had pushed through the pain and into victory. My son was not breathing, however. He was blue, he wasn’t crying, and he was limp. He was taken immediately to the NICU station they had set up next to me and they worked on him for nearly 40 minutes. Tubes down his throat, trying to suction the liquid out of his lungs. Oxygen being given to him. I didn’t realize the severity of the situation until after, which is Gods gift of grace to me. They stabilized him about 40 minutes after he was born and brought him to my chest still hooked up to all their monitors. I got to hold my baby for a short amount of time before he was once again taken from me to the NICU because he wasn’t breathing well. I went to my room still not understanding all that had happened in such a short amount of time. My husband wheeled me to the NICU shortly after, where I was able to gently place my hand on my boy through the incubator but not allowed to hold him. He had a feeding tube in his nose and I wouldn’t be able to breastfeed him for days. The next day we were told that he would be there a few days as long as he began to breathe better on his own, we needed his respirations per minute to come down from 100-120 to a normal range of 40-60. This would happen as his lungs cleared the fluid that he breathed in. This was painful news, but really we were so grateful that he was ok and that soon enough we would be allowed to take him home.  Then things changed. In the night my sons heart rate plummeted and his oxygen as well. He turned blue and the nurses intervened to bring him out of this event. He fell too deep into sleep and forgot to breathe. We would have many of these events over the next few days… this is where my anxiety really took hold of me in a way it had never done before. I began to wonder if I would have a baby in my arms when I went home. Would he make it through this? I had assumed that everything would be just fine and it wasn’t fine. He even had one of these events while laying on my chest. Along with the medical issues Laith was having, I missed my other two children so much. They have never been apart from me. A couple of days after Laith was born they got sick and I wasn’t able to see them anymore. I couldn’t risk getting sick myself and not being allowed to go to the NICU and be with my newborn. So the kids and Nathan stayed away. Several others weren’t feeling well and the first week of the NICU was an extremely lonely time. I slept only a couple of hours each night, had to sleep on the other side of the hospital away from my baby… which is something I am not used to doing. I held my son and watched alarms constantly go off and nurses rush to stimulate him as he turned blue from forgetting to breathe. This was not the plan. This was not perfection. This was hell. 

The panic attacks I was having continued to get worse, I couldn’t sleep… I was spiraling. One night I asked the nurse to feed him once through a bottle in the night so that I could try to sleep a little. I went to my room and had one of the worst panic attacks I’ve ever had. I cried myself to sleep repeating how I needed to let go. Let go of the control… let go of the outcome. I wouldn’t leave his side and wouldn’t sleep because I thought I could control and will the outcome I wanted if I just tried hard enough. But, my body had only had a couple hours of sleep each night for almost a week at this point. I couldn’t physically do this anymore. I had to tell myself that even if the worst happened, that I would be ok. I had to let go. Holding on was killing me.  So I did, I let go. Whatever the outcome was to be, it was time to let go.

As the days went on, I finally got a rhythm. I watched my children come and go and the the leaves fall from the trees through our doorbell camera. I held my son and blocked myself from seeing his monitors, and put headphones in and listened to music so I wouldn’t hear them going off, or the other parents crying in their crisis as doctors tried to help their tiny babies. I trusted that the nurses would come and help him and I stopped controlling it. I held him and stared at his face and tried to just enjoy the moments of having in my arms… The here and the now, no matter what happened in the end of this journey. The events grew less and less, until the first day we had gone 24 hours without them. Then 48 hours. Then 3 days…. We were told once he had hit 5 days without an event we could go home. I was scared to hope… I didn’t want to feel crushed if we had to start over. The important thing was that we go home with a healthy baby that was ready to be off of the monitors. I would gladly sit there as long as it took to make sure that happened. 

It was like I crawled into a womb away from the rest of the world with my son. A place for me to grow along with him… a place for me to learn to stop controlling my world, to let go of the image of perfection I had for my life, my home, my experiences. To let go of the fear of losing my loved ones, and experience the joy of the here and the now with this precious boy. Not to take a moment for granted that I had with him. 

I went home to grab clothing for myself, to see that the house had been lived in the past couple of weeks. My Children’s toys on the floor in a large pile. My dogs muddy footprints throughout the house. Drawings and painting my kids had done on every surface. Clothes laid out to dry across my room. Not the perfection I had tried to ensure for the day I brought my son home. It didn’t smell like apples and cinnamon, it smelt like the deer my loving husband had cooked for our children the night before. It smelt and looked like a home that was lived in, a place that love dwelt. I cancelled the appointment I had to have a cleaner come for the the day before we are scheduled to go home.  I realized that this image of perfection isn’t reality. Life is not perfect, things don’t go according to plan. It’s time that I learned to breathe a little, and let things be what they are. My beautiful nails that I had done to perfection before the birth have now been chewed off during this stay. But, my son doesn’t care if my nails are perfect or if there are dishes in the sink and jelly fingerprints on the wall from his big brother. My children will not remember how clean the house was but how much I loved them, even when life isn’t perfection. 

I have all I need. I’m alive, my baby is alive, my children have been well taken care of, I am loved and supported by my family. Loved and supported by so many friends. That is quite a beautiful reality. And just like the birth, when I thought I couldn’t do it anymore, I have breathed through these past couple of weeks, even when I felt I might die, and I have done what people have done for ages. I’ve gotten through it. And I will continue to go through it and get through it no matter the outcome.