The Best Worst Place

Recently, I met a fellow neonatal mum face to face. We were introduced by a good mutual friend of ours and had both had daughters on the Tiny Lives unit at the RVI. Our daughters had missed each other by a couple of weeks. Her gorgeous 30-weeker, now 16 months old, was born due to placental abruption. Immediately, it was like we were part of a secret club with a code language. In minutes we swapped procedures, compared stories, established mutual acquaintances on the ward and compared favourite doctors and nurses. 

"It was such a wonderful place."

"So lovely; just incredible."

Our friend, with her term baby, looked at us as if we were mad.

We paused and looked at each other as if we were mad. And quickly looked away, a slight welling of the eye and a lump in the throat.

"A horrible place."

"The worst place to be."

The thing is, both things are true. A good NICU is the best worst place to be. If you're going to be separated from your newborn, you damn well want them to be in the best equipped place with the most high-tech machines and knowledgeable staff yet also with compassion. But of course, even the best NICU, the one with the friendliest nurses and the most intelligent doctors and the newest and sparkliest and beepiest machine is never going to be enough. 

Because it's not with you. 

You can visit, yes. But that is the hitch: you have to leave. Night after night, you have to walk away. Bye bye, baby. Does your child, wired up, know you are leaving? Know the difference between night or day? Know inherently that you should be there, forever and always? That is all debatable. But to you it goes against the very grain of parenthood. It is the strangest thing: you know it is the best place for them. But you also know, that it will always fall short and cheat you both of the most loving and most caring place: being there with you.

Kangaroo Care

One of my biggest regrets about Wriggles' stay in NICU/SCBU was the Kangaroo Care, or rather lack ok it.

Kangaroo Care is essentially skin-to-skin, and consists of popping a baby down your jumper or similar. If you want to fast-track your relationship with a nurse, this is a great way to get them fumbling around your bra as they rescue little limbs and caught up wires. You won't feel shy asking for help after that with them! Depending on the gestation and size of your baby, they may still be very small and likely to potentially get lost inside your clothes. The first time I did it, I lost count of the amount of times that poor Lisa, the nurse, had to rescue Wriggles from inside my dress. She would have been about 30-31 weeks and was still a titch. It very much improved my relationship with Lisa though!

Kangaroo Care has many great benefits for premature babies; the heat from the parent's body means that they do not have to struggle maintaining their temperatures thus saving precious calories, deeper and longer sleep can be established, it is comfort and security for both parties,

Finding the Perfect Gift

My best friend from university has recently found out she is pregnant and I am delighted for her. Her little bean is due in June 2012 and in the mean time I am trying to find the perfect present. She is cautiously waiting until 24 weeks (viability; Wriggles' premature experience has made her walk on eggshells) before shouting it out to the world who hasn't already guessed, but they are keeping the gender strictly under wraps.

I think this is really quite a nice idea; so many newborn or indeed any baby items are so gender stereotyped that it seems like a special challenge to find a really lovely present for a newborn. No pink! No blue! And we all know that lovely as white is, beautiful and pure, it is the least practical colour for a newborn. I imagine that family members will overdose on teddy bears (it seems to be some divine law) and given that as a shattered new parent you can only muster up so much polite excitement about novelty sloganned bibs, I really want to find a longer-term keepsake. Also, I remember selfishly thinking when Wriggles was born that it would be quite nice to dress my own daughter some days!

I have narrowed it down to a few things and I may well try and "road test" them first as I personally am quite enamoured with them!

• "My Life Journal" by Suck Uk. Essentially a 100 year diary, this is a beautifully bound scrapbook that is split up into year with each year separated by seasons with pockets for photos, keepsakes and special pictures and awards. There is a world map so you can mark everywhere you lived and went on holiday, a body map to chart bumps, bruises, war-wounds and tattoos and many other things to mark off. It sounds a lovely idea to fill up and take over from your parents as you grow older.

• I am a little obsessed with Folksy and saw this amazingly cute Memory Make Stegosaurus , by Molly Moo and Jessica Too. It is simple: you sent them some sentimental fabric, and they craft a cuddly dinosaur from it! Who doesn't like a dinosaur? This may need some consultation with the expectant parents (I imagine nabbing my friend's favourite jumper will not endear me to her..) but there are so many possibilities of making a really personal present.

• Then lastly is this photo book by Sassy, which I must confess has already lured me into clicking "buy"! (Why Amazon, why? Internet shopping just does not feel like real shopping. Dangerous) The 'Look Book' is a photo album for babies, made out of sturdy boards with bright colours and some texture, it has 7 pockets to put your own pictures in. Apparently the handle also doubles up as a teething ring; genius! Well at least it looks genius-we shall soon see!

Growing up: Wriggles in Review!

It's that time of year again, spring cleaning my frankly horrific flat. In a delayed New Year state of reminiscing I have also been getting very nostalgic, not least as I've been boxed up grown-out-of baby clothes and coming across things still packed up from the last move, in April 2011. So to start the year off (again. Yes I do realise it's now 7th January not 1st) I am looking back at Wriggles' life so far and how we came to this point where we are.

The past 16 months have been very high and low. It has been a real struggle sometimes, so completely not what I expected with your first baby. I'm pretty sure this is true for every new family, but on top of this I have emerged with a wealth of medical knowledge and can hold my own in a doctors round. My mental "fog" is now much clearer than it has been. I'm not sure whether the past muddle has been PND, Post Traumatic Stress or a mixture of both, flitting smoothly from one to the other, but it has snatched memories I will never get back which makes me very sad. I am proud of where we are now: not least because I got here in the main part on my own.

As I have been clearing and sorting, I've been reflecting on what physically is truly precious to keep. Answer: not much. However there are some special things like any Mummy that I will treasure forever. Favourite tiny outfits; cot sheets that smell of baby, or at least baby scented washing powder... My most treasured possessions of the physical variety stem back from our time in Special Care. I do have things which mean a lot pre-Wriggles and more recent things, but the one thing I would be bereft of is a pink box (above). This was collected whilst in SCBU and the box and yellow diary were gifts from Tiny Lives, the charity attached to our unit that fundraises for life-saving new equipment and provides vital family support. 

In this treasure trove are the following: diary of our stay, Wriggles' hospital band, my hospital band, the information sellotaped to her cot, some prem-baby socks never worn, her blood pressure cuff, the photograph that I slept with all the time she was in (so it was the first thing I saw in the morning and the last thing at night), the probe which conducted her oxygen sats traces, her first dummies and her first (well not literally first; replica of) nappy.

It is so easy to forget how small she was. Born at 1090g (2lbs 5 and a bit oz) at just under 28 weeks gestation, she was not a lot bigger than my hand. Maybe head to toe she was two small hands long, maybe just under. She was, and this is crass to compare, about the size of a handpuppet. I don't know why it is so desperate for me not to forget, and we all know size isn't everything, but these physical reminders bring it back like yesterday. Our journeys make us who we are, and SCBU strongly shaped the early days of our lives and later ones two. Any ongoing issues now are put down directly to prematurity, so these objects from the 'beginning' are very precious for me. They make up for the absence of what I ideally wanted for my newborn. I do have some happy memories of SCBU, first cuddles, brief attempts at kangaroo care, days spent by the incubator, watching her grow and the privilege of seeing what would otherwise be a developing foetus but it is the stark reminders of the reality rather than the New Baby! cards which mean much more to me.

 

Images: 1. first dummy next to standard 0 months + dummy 2. first nappy next to newborn sized babygro, which finally fitted Wriggles somewhere between 4-5 months! 3. Look how far I've come!

My other precious object is not in the box because it is in the photo-album. It is the first picture ever taken of her, in NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) on the night of her birth shortly after she had arrived at the unit from a&e at a different hospital. She is battered, bruised and bright red. Her skin is see-through and still smeared with blood, only one eye had opened and there is a slight perferation to her chect. There are ECG leads on and a tube attaching her to a ventilator. It is not a pretty picture. But I love it. It gives me back what I wasn't there to see. I couldn't hold her hand but it does give me that piece of history to hold on to.