Tag Archives: Family

Christmas frickin’ Magic

29 Friday Dec 2017

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The last two Christmases have not been fantastic.

Last year, I finished work on Friday, 23 December, and sat at the kitchen table ready for the holidays. I remember saying ‘I am so excited!’ about an hour before I went to the bathroom and saw blood in my underwear.

For most women, that’s called a menstrual cycle. But I was 23 weeks, 6 days pregnant. I had had an ultrasound earlier that day and it had been positive – it was a high-risk pregnancy but things were generally stable and I left feeling lighter than I had in the past. I was on the cusp of viability! This was HAPPENING!

I was at the hospital less than half an hour later.

The same doctor who had scanned me earlier that day came in, and confirmed that I’d had a bleed but that both girls were still moving. It looked like it might just be a one-off, and then it happened again. And again. And faster and faster.

I chugged water from paper cups in the triage area, running laps between the bathroom and our curtained-off area. A couple hours later, I was transferred to Labour & Delivery – not a positive sign – where I thankfully had a private room with ensuite bath (not all rooms do) and could schlep between the bed and the toilet. I noticed a tiny new stretch mark, running north from my bellybutton, and stared at the blue screensaver on the computer kiosk in a corner of the room, only realising the next morning that I could have turned off the monitor. But by midnight, the bleeding had just…trailed off. The same doctor – bless you, Catherine Aiken – came in to discuss delivery and steroid shots (I got one) and the NICU team came to prep me for the worst. Daphne was 400 grams at that point, and would not have been expected to survive; Fiona, at about 540, stood a fighting chance. Ian went home at about one in the morning and I spent the rest of the night the same way – staring numbly into space, trying to sleep, punctuated with trips to the toilet that confirmed I was mostly not bleeding anymore.

The next morning, a midwife’s assistant brought me tea and toast. I sat on the inclined bed with a Styrofoam cup of tea in my lap and sobbed and sobbed, while my daughters – now an even 24 weeks, and officially Viable as far as the medical establishment was concerned – wiggled and thumped inside me.

I was retrospectively diagnosed with a partial placenta previa, a complication that can be fatal to mum and baby – or can be so minor as to barely register as a complication at all. I left the hospital on Boxing Day, and we had family Christmas two days late. A week later, I had another bleed – a much more minor one – and spent New Year’s in the hospital. And that was last year’s holiday season. Yippee!

That would be enough to feel like I had to bring the Christmas Magic this year, but it turns out there is a theme. Two years ago, I had a miscarriage at 11 weeks pregnant (later diagnosed as having been caused by Graves’ Disease – basically an overactive thyroid), on the 17th of December. It had been an easy, breezy pregnancy to that point – things had gone 100% according to plan with minimal morning sickness, and once we crossed the 9 week mark I thought, ‘well this is fantastic; my chances of miscarriage now are like 2%’

Well, someone has to be in that 2%.

My memories of the miscarriage mostly involve crying: at the ultrasound, when they confirmed there was no heartbeat; in the shower, on the toilet, in my mother’s arms when I found the ‘big brother’ shirt I’d ordered to my parents’ house. Eventually I found a grief anthem: I would sing a chorus from a Ben Folds song and allow myself to feel All the Feels – sometimes I sang it twice – and then I’d pull myself together. All the same, it was a rough few weeks that stretched into months, when we learned that I had to wait until my thyroid was managed to try again.

This year – and every year from now on – I am free from reproductive stress. Our family is complete; this uterus has closed up shop. But as the 23rd of December approached, and I realised that last year would cast a longer shadow than I had anticipated, I felt a lot of self-inflicted pressure to make this holiday special. To start new traditions that would drown out the stress and disappointment of previous Decembers. To celebrate that we had come out of a difficult couple of years with three healthy children. Basically, to create Christmas memories that would drown out the crumminess of the last two years.

Here is the problem: my baby daughters don’t care; my husband doesn’t care (at least not nearly as much as I do); and my son just wants to eat treats and open presents, and will have only the haziest memories of this year if he has any at all. All five of us have colds, except for Theo, who is stuck at home because nursery is closed for the week and is going stir crazy. Holiday perfection has taken a backseat to sleeping and trying not to succumb to our desire to just plop our three year old in front of Paw Patrol and call it a damn day.

Where there has been magic, it has been incidental, which I guess is a good lesson to take from the festive season. Daphne waved at her grandparents and aunts during a Skype call on Christmas, a development that is way ahead of schedule and for which there were many witnesses. In the last four days, Fiona has become an indisputably mobile baby. She doesn’t go fast or far, but she doesn’t stay where you put her, either. Theo’s math skills have taken a step forward – when counting pound coins he received with a piggybank, he got to 8 and said ‘I think I have ten!’ And all three children started playing together for the first time when their new toy, Wobble Bear, was placed between the three of them, which felt like a freaking Christmas Miracle. Some of this stuff was facilitated by Christmas, but its mostly every day stuff that we noticed because we’re all sitting around driving each other a little nuts.

It will take more than one week of bad weather and sick children to erase the scary sadness of the last two Christmases, and an insistence on a CHRISTMAS FAMILY BRUNCH, DAMMIT are probably not going to help. But that’s a lesson in and of itself, and I will take it.

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The Tiny Baby Blues

26 Tuesday Dec 2017

Posted by in babies, Delivery, Early Days, Parenthood, pregnancy, Uncategorized

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I met a family last week who had an extremely premature baby. I had two extremely premature babies, but this baby was so premature that I was reduced to saying, essentially, ‘oh, shit, that’s an early baby.’

I have been thinking about that family a lot since. They arrived at the NICU – our NICU – a couple months after we left and stayed for a long time, though they are home now. But I keep feeling regret for them – not that they spent four months with a baby in the hospital, though that sure sucks a lot – but that they left the hospital without the resources that they would have had if things had gone more smoothly. Its hard to make friends with other parents when your experience diverged so sharply from everyone else’s so early, and its hard to settle into a rhythm as a new parent when you feel alienated from everyone else and their robust, healthy, oxygen-free newborns.

When I was pregnant with my first child, my husband and I did a birth-prep class. We had been warned that the content was not especially useful (it wasn’t), but that there was a lot of value in meeting your classmates – classes are organised by neighbourhood, and we live in an extremely fertile area, so our classmates lived around the corner, down the road, up the street – we were extremely geographically concentrated. When one of the babies was born early, the father sent an email to all of us saying how nice it was to meet everyone and he hoped to see us again soon sometime.

We had a good laugh about that at our fourth annual birth-prep group holiday in October. We saw each other almost every day all summer, and are still in regular contact with virtually everyone in the group, which has swelled (with second and, in our case, third children) to 32 people.

My group are outliers; most people don’t end up taking regular vacations with their parenting classmates. But most people do leave the hospital with a roughly shared experience of birth and new parenthood. Plus a baby. Most people leave the hospital and take their child with them.

For NICU families, it isn’t like that. I found it relatively easy to leave my daughters behind, not because I’m a callous witch, but because they were clearly…not finished. They were in incubators and they clearly needed to be. I found it harder at the end, when we were in sight of a finish line that never seemed to get any closer, and the girls looked and acted like babies instead of fetuses.

Still, from the moment they were born, I thought they were perfect. I wanted to tell people about my gorgeous twin daughters as much as any other new parent. When I was two weeks postpartum, I took my son to a birthday party and people asked how I was. It was only as I watched their eyes widen that I realised I had to adjust my rhetoric a little. ‘I just gave birth to tiny, perfect, extremely premature babies!’ isn’t exactly cocktail fodder. No one knew what to say. I skipped the next preschool party.

Of course there are families in the NICU who are going through something similar to what you’re experiencing. When people ask if I made friends in the NICU, I say ‘well – Facebook friends.’ I did meet people whose acquaintance I value, but none of them live within a twenty mile radius. Catchment areas for Category III (most intensive) NICUs can be huge; there are only a few in the UK. There are always families coming and going, and there is a hierarchy. One woman took weeks to warm up to me, presumably because her kid was having a rough go and she didn’t want to deal with another baby having an easier time than hers.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about this family I met recently, who had four crummy months in the hospital only to find themselves starting from a different place than everyone else who has a baby the same age (actual or adjusted) after they got discharged. I’ve wondered what could be done to make it easier for them, and I’ve wondered what I could do without coming across as an overzealous weirdo. I haven’t come up with much so far.

 

 

Now that I’m a Mum of Three

19 Monday Jun 2017

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Didn’t plan on having a litter.

 

When my first child was born, I remember walking dreamily around the hospital room telling a friend that I couldn’t believe something so perfect had come out of me. Objectively, this was not true – kid was a weird looking baby. He was super scrawny, and the first time my sister saw him, she squeaked ‘he looks like an alien!’

(she wasn’t wrong)

Maybe because of the persistent anxiety that defined this pregnancy, or because they were whisked away in incubators while I still felt too shaky from the c-section to touch them, or because two babies is a lot of baby – I didn’t have that this time. I have felt fierce, and protective, and grateful, and scared. But a couple days ago, I looked at my two daughters and said to them ‘I love you so much!’ and was surprised to realise that it was the first time the phrase had come naturally to me.

I learned I was having twins ten months ago, and today, I still struggle to believe that I have three kids – even with all three of them in front of me, it doesn’t seem real. I am still recalibrating my life as a parent – this isn’t the family I imagined, and the third kid is the hardest part. And to be clear, are all the third kid: Theo, when he runs into the bedroom at 6:30 on the nose to ask if he can watch Paw Patrol; Daphne, when she screams because she’s starving but the boob is RIGHT THERE; Fiona, when…well, she’s actually a pretty chilled out baby but she definitely has her moments. I want all three of these kids, but I didn’t want three kids, and I’m still mourning the vision I had for my family, even as I feel myself falling more and more in love with what I actually have.

 

Shit you shouldn’t ask NICU parents

03 Saturday Jun 2017

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Sniff you later, NICU!

My twin daughters Fiona and Daphne were born at 31 weeks this February and were teeny tiny perfect little peanuts. We’d known from early on in the pregnancy that the girls would be facing a long NICU stay, and I think the advance warning was 100% key to my (relatively) stable emotional and mental state throughout the ten weeks we spent on the NICU.

But prepping the people around me was hard. I kept telling my dad we expected the girls to be about three lbs (1.5 kilos) and he would make a choking noise on the phone which, frankly, was not helpful.

In one memorable conversation, I said ‘we don’t know when they will come home even after we have a c section date’

He said ‘oh yeah, because they’ll be in the NICU for a few days.’

‘No, Dad. We’re hoping for 4-6 weeks in the best case scenario.’

‘WHAT?!’

I mean, how would he know? He was just worried, as of course we were too. But managing other people’s expectations gets exhausting really damn fast, especially when you’re working so hard to manage your own. So here is a list of NICU do’s and don’ts for family and friends.

1. For the love of god, don’t ask when the baby/babies are coming home. Do not do this. DO NOT. I know it seems like a totally innocuous question but a. everyone asks and b. as with many long-term hospital stays, the kids are in there until they get discharged. Something can go wrong up until the moment you walk out the door, and I spent most of the ten weeks holding my breath. In Fiona’s case, she had a final, pre-discharge blood test – at which we discovered she was anaemic. She spent another week in the hospital while they monitored her haemoglobin levels.

The best analogy I have come up with, for those of you with friends in academia, is that it’s like asking a PhD student when they are going to graduate. The answer is ‘as soon as possible.’

2. Don’t expect photos. Even the relatively healthy babies are often hooked up to a lot of crap – oxygen, breathing, heart rate and apnea monitors are pretty standard. Really, really early babies are often a non-skin colour – blue or translucent – and breathing apparatus obscures their faces anyway.

3. Hopefully this goes without saying, but do your best not to express alarm at a baby’s weight or age at birth.  Daphne was under two lbs. I know that’s tiny. I dislike telling people because they look so startled. But of course, not all NICU babies are early; some have a rough start for other reason. A friend recently spent nearly three weeks in the NICU with a past-term baby, and the most alarming thing I witnessed in the NICU was a 37 weeker rushed in from labour & delivery (thankfully, that baby was home in under a week).

4. Do all the things you would normally do for parent of a newborn – bring food, send cards, keep in touch via text messages (I personally loved texting – you can’t speak on the phone in the NICU, but texting was allowed. When I was spending hours in a hermetically sealed room, with alarms beeping around me, I was beyond grateful for the friends who sent me chatty texts, especially when they kept texting over a period of hours or days). Basically cultivate the same ‘it takes a village’ approach that you would if the baby was at home. Virtual support is still support, and it’s something you can offer even if you are far away or pressed for time.

5. Don’t assume the mum is getting sleep because the baby isn’t home. You are strongly encouraged to pump breastmilk for NICU babes, and for first time mums especially, it can be stressful and time consuming. And it has to happen on a regular schedule – so even if the kid is in the hospital, there is a good chance the mum is getting up every four hours to milk herself.

6. Do send media recommendations. I found most books to be a little too much for me, and I didn’t like to bring books into the sterile environment anyway – when I read them, I read them on my phone (sterilised daily with a Clinell wipe)(my husband brought gross dusty paperbacks in all the time, though, so – personal preference). But I read longform journalism, listened to podcasts, and while I was expressing I watched Netflix shows that I’d cached on my phone.

7. Don’t send pics of your healthy baby, if you have one. A friend sent a pic of her healthy, smiling newborn with the caption ‘forgot how great these smiles are!’ And I wasn’t angry, exactly, but I had two kids hooked up to machines in incubators at the time and I had a hard time mustering enthusiasm for her sweet healthy baby. I’m not proud of myself – I wish I had been more generous of spirit – but I don’t think I’m alone among NICU parents. Stupid healthy babies and their stupid clueless parents.

One in ten babies are born early or unwell, so hopefully this advice will never be pertinent to you, but odds are it will. That said – to avoid ending on a dour note – most NICU babes are just fine. A rough start doesn’t necessarily dictate what happens when a baby goes home, but it sure does suck while it’s happening, and having the right kind of support can be a huge help.