Hospital Recuperation

Recovering from the surgery is emotionally and physically exhausting.  While you're still in the hospital, everyone wants to come visit you and the baby.  Only family was allowed into the NICU, so the hubby led a train of parents, siblings, aunts and uncles through the halls of Valley Hospital.  My sardine sized room was filled with people and flowers and stuffed animals, but no baby.  At night, I could hear the woman next door soothing her crying newborn and the emotional pain felt like it could rip open my c-section stitches.

The first day the hubby pushed me to the NICU in a wheelchair-I couldn't walk all the way there.  Hell, I could barely stand up.  The rules: your baby doesn't want to be touched, don't stroke or caress your baby, do not make loud sounds, do not tap on the isolette, you can not hold your baby, you can not kiss your baby.  I was also on a lot of drugs that, within 12 hours, had me vomiting and shitting my brains out, simultaneously...apparently percocet is not for me.

Lily-still intubated, but she found me pretty much immediately. I took this picture.

Over the next couple of days (insurance paid for 96 hours), I gained the physical strength to walk all the way to the NICU.  The hubby got to go home and shower and get at least 1 good night's sleep.  Valley was amazing-it was like it was run by a staff of Jewish and Italian mothers who wanted to feed you and fuss over you and do anything they could to make your stay more comfortable.  And the post-baby spa shower was the best shower I've ever taken in my life.  No joke-they had a rain-shower head and jets shooting out from the wall.  The whole spa shower was enormous with fresh linens and a place for the hubby to sit while I was soaping my bandages.

It all comes across as vain-going on and on about a shower and food and being treated like a goddess while my daughter was across the hospital in an isolette, trying to regulate her breathing.  Did I mention the drugs?  Well, I was on a lot of them, and I was also having a lot of trouble understanding what was actually happening-I knew that I had a baby, but it really didn't feel like I did.  My stomach was enormous and I only wore hospital gowns-I didn't feel right putting on my own clothes (and we didn't have any of my own things for a couple of days because, at 30 weeks, we didn't think we needed to pack our hospital bag yet).  I was stuck between 2 very strange emotional worlds: one world was hyper rational and the other world was so numb that even my surgical pain couldn't convince me that everything was real.