The journey of my 29 weeker, part 3....

We lost so many things durring the 48 days Bitty spent in the NICU, but for everything we seemed to lose, we gained more than i ever thought imaginable. When you have a child in the NICU, it forces you to turn a corner that you may have otherwise not known exsisted. There comes a point where you have to get over the "why me, why my baby" self inflicted guilt, and be the solid rock of a foundation your baby is gonna need you to be. It forces you to change your way of life, your way of thinking, and the dreams you had put in place when you were pregnant. Planning your future together takes on a whole new meaning.

There were many nights where we thought we were going to get that phone call. The phone call every preemie parent knows exsists and prays they will never get. The one that comes at 2am with a voice on the other end telling you that you need come in right now becuase your child isn't gonna make it. We were lucky and obviously never got it. But that's the extent of where your thoughts of the future take you. The future to a NICU parent is not a year from now, but an hour from now, or a minute from now. Nobody is garaunteed a tomorrow and the parents of preemies know that more than anyone should.

I cannot really remember eveything i thought or felt other than, more often than not, unconsolible guilt and anger. It was always hard seeing a new baby being brought in. When you spend enough time in the NICU, you learn to recognize the signs that another baby is being brought into the world entirely too early. There's a buzz in the air, a slight uneasiness about the nurses, a more hurried step and a shuffle of the babies that are already there. Somehow, they manage to sorta hide the new baby, but you can feel the mothers presence as she's brought in. My heart would always go out to that new mom. I would want to comfort her, i still feel that need, but my experiance is that of a mother whos child has made it through to the other side and if there's one thing i hated, positively dispised, it was being told by another mother, ANY mother, that they understood what i was going through and that things would be okay. So i, and i'm sure i'm not alone in this, would simply give them that look. The look of kind eyes. It never lasts long though, because about the time you let your mind or eyes go off your baby, they will inevetably forget to breath. However, seeing a baby go home, a baby who hadn't even been there as long as yours, well....it brought an anger out in me that nothing else ever could. "Why are they going home, my baby's been here longer she should be the one going home." I would be angery at the nurses, angery at the other moms, angery at, mostly, myself. It's not a regular sort of anger, but one that is born out of heartache. For, you long to be able to hold and comfort your child, at home, on your time, whenever you want.

I longed to be able to physically nurse my daughter. I yerned for the warmth of her tiny body against my chest and while i may have conviently forgotten some of the feelings that i felt, the feeling of the first time i was able to nurse my daughter, that will forever stay in my heart. It's true what they say, about the whole bonding experiance. In one magical, akward, frusterating, disappointing moment, i had instantly felt an attachment to my daughter that i hadn't felt before. She was mine and we were "normal", if only for a mere minute. It didn't take long for a lactation consultant to ruin my moment. I was doing just fine without her. I felt like a pro, a pro nursing a baby who didn't know how to barely suck and had a mouth too small to really even latch ahold, but none the less, i felt like a pro and i didn't really care that it was the most akward and challenging thing i had ever tried to do. But that damn lactation consultant, or the booby natzi as i called her (when she wasn't around). I was sureanly trying to nurse my daughter when she waltzed over, all.....natzi like. She peered over my should and instantly my comforting moment had turned to an uncomfortable one. "What is your plan?" Seriously?! You're asking me this question, IN THE NICU! Uh, my plan was to have a baby 11 weeks early, watch her fight for her life and not be able to barely hold or comfort her. I always wanted to hook my tender, swollen, achey boobs to a breast pump. I decided not to like her from that moment on. I also remember hearing ask another NICU mommy that very same question and i wanted so badly to tell her to go to hell and that she obviously had never had a preemie, for if she did she sure as hell wouldn't be asking that question. I know my "plan" was to have a full term baby naturally, nurse her whenever she wanted to and go home 2 days later, WITH MY BABY. She wasn't very helpful nor was she very informative and honestly i can't really remember what she taught me, if it was anything at all. As akward as trying to nurse Bitty was, it somehow felt natural. However, like all good things, it didn't last. She couldn't nurse without a nipple sheild and even then, it was too hard for her. And, after one very bad experiance with a NICU nurse following one of Bitty's feedings, i simply gave up and continued to pump and give her a bottle.

The horrible nurse experiance goes as follows. Bitty had finally started to get the hang of the suck/swollow/breath reflex and was breathing well enough that she no longer had to be on oxygen support, all she had left was a feeding tube. It was shortly after i had started to nurse her and it was a little tricky trying to figure out how much milk she had gotten from me and if she need to be supplimented through her feeding tube. The nurse she usually had would weigh her before i would nurse and then after to get an estimate of how much milk she took in. Well, one day she had happened to have a different a nurse, one she only had a handful of times. She was a good nurse, a very capable nurse, a nurse that, in that moment, i hated. Bitty was starting the process of being able to come home. She had to pass the carseat test, which is where they place them in their carseat while they are hooked up to all the bells and whistles, and they have to be able to sit there for something like a half hour without setting off any of their alarms, if they can do that then they pass, if not, they wait a couple more days and test them again. They also have to go a full 7 or 10 days, i can't remember anymore, with out having any alarms and if they go those 7/10 days, they get to go home. But, if at any point in that time frame they have an alarm, like they stop breathing or their heart beat gets funky, they have to start all over, even if it happens on the very last day. Bitty was like 2 days into it, when that nurse didn't listen to me when i said i felt as though Bitty had eaten enough that she didn't need any of what they considered her "full feeding" through her feeding tube. She pushed like half of her "full feeding", which at that point was quite alot, through her feeding tube. Within moments, Bitty began to asperate, setting off her breathing alarm. (I still get shakey talking about it. Apparently, it still upsets me, LOL) Talk about a heart stopping, heart pounding moment. I wanted to kill that nurse, right there. I was so furious that, once Bitty was stable again, i actually had to leave the NICU and made up my mind that i was DONE nursing my daughter. It was the week of Christmas, we new she wouldn't be home for it, but now it was gonna be later than we had hoped for. All because a nurse refused to listen me. It didn't take long for word to spread of what had happened in that NICU pod and when i had return later in the day with my husband, her regular nurse was back on her service. She assured me that i shouldn't let that one incidence stop me from nursing my daughter, but how couldn't i. We didn't learn until the following day, that they (the neonatoligists) weren't going to hold that alarm against Bitty since it, technically, wasn't her fault. She wouldn't have to start back at day one. YEAH! The next few days were uneventful. She passed her carseat test with flying colors. She was breathing on her own and her heart finally knew what it was supposed to do.

When we walked into that NICU pod on a sunny December day, three days after Christmas, we got to see our daughter in all her glory, for the first time in 48 days. No wires atatched to her body. No tubes comming from her nose and mouth. Just the baby she was ment to be. Well, it was like giving birth all over again. We dressed her in pretty purple, fuzzy, footed outfit. Still preemie sized and still too big. She was all of 4lbs 8oz on the day she finally felt like MY baby. This was the day we had waited for. They day we had prayed for but felt like it would never come. They day i became mom i secretely dispised for 48 days, the mom who FINALLY got to take her baby home. Though the car ride home was nerve racking, as were those first moments when we arrived at home, she was finally ours. As terrifying as it was to not have a nurse right there, holding your hand, it was wonderfully marvilous as well. She, too, seemed to know she was finally right where she belonged.

The three years since her birth have been filled with so many ups and downs, and i'm sure every first time parent experiances those. But ours were met with a different set of obsticles and had a different set of goals. Sure, our daughter was now almost two months old, but technically she wasn't even still supposed to be born. She still had just about a month to go until what was to be her due date. She may have been a month and half old, but she couldn't hold her head up, she slept most of the time and was eating every two hours. We couldn't take her anywhere but to the doctors, where she would go every month from the time she came home up until April for RSV shots. God, them damn shots were quite the pain, but well worth every trip and the $1000 i had to go and cry to my grandma for when the insurance company played the, "we don't accept your secondary insurance (since it was welfare insurance) and you need to pay the $1000 deductable before we release the shot to your pediatrician." We learned, when she was six months old, that she was pretty far behind for her chronilogical age, mostly because of me and the fact that i could stop seeing her as that little, 2lb. baby she WAS. So, as any good parent would do in that type of situation, we got her enrolled in Early Intervention (E.I.) and within another six months, she was deemed physically caught up and her physical therapy would end, however she couldn't really swollow solid food so she was given an Occupational Therapist to help teach us tricks to get her caught up with that as well.

Today, she is a picture perfect, healthy, above average in everyway three year old. A shadow of her former self. The only things that remain of her early, short of miraculous start in life, are her "coke bottle" glasses and some scares on her hands and feet. And the memories i will forever hold onto and thank God she does not.