11 Weeks, Part 3 (B)

So less than a week later and we were back in the hospital, this time in the E.R., while the doctor took Lily’s blood and my mother and hubby tried to calm Lily down-I paced and fidgeted and cried, listening to her screams from an adjoining children’s lounge.  I also realized that I forgot all of the parts for Lily’s bottle, so I ran up to the NICU, explained the situation, and got a bucket full of disposable nipples.  Eventually my husband forced me to lie down in a neighboring room until they figured everything out. I don’t know if it was the stress or the sleep exhaustion or the anxiety or the fact that it was three in the morning, but I actually took a 20 minute nap, and it was amazing-when my hubby woke me up to tell me that Lily was being transferred to the NICU, I felt clear and calm.  Of course we were being readmitted-those were the doctors who knew her the best!  They would figure out what was wrong and then she would come home.  After a good night’s rest, I camped out in the NICU.

Every stop along the way, the triage nurse, the ER pediatrician, the NICU nurses, the NICU neonatologists…even the nursery front desk woman (we got pretty tight after 11 weeks)..everyone asked, “what happened?” and every time I dutifully recounted the normalcy, the smiling, the cough, and then the dark blue color and the pounding on Lily’s back.  But, most importantly, the fact that the monitors didn’t go off.  The NICU understood completely, and I think that it’s something that only a NICU parent could understand.  I wasn’t upset about the “episode”-honestly, I expected multiple episodes, having to do infant CPR, frantic calls to doctors, choking on feeds, etc., etc…I was ready for all of that, because I had the monitors to tell me when I was needed.  I’d spent 11 weeks in the NICU training to be able to do this-the nurses often joked that they’d have to put me on staff.  I wasn’t prepared for my failsafe to fail.

This NICU stay was different-we were given an upfront release date (“we’re only keeping her 2-3 days for observation”), we had a specific cause and reason for the stay, and people were even more accommodating than they had been.  They gave us a semi-private room and let me ignore the NICU schedule hours-I was one of the gang.  It also didn’t hurt that a lot of the nurses thought that Lily was released too soon anyway, so they felt partially responsible for our return.  We also heard from our pediatrician-profuse apologies-apparently, their service failed to deliver ANY messages that night and we were not the only emergency.  They’ve since changed services (if I was them, I would’ve sued).

The bottom line, direct from the chief’s mouth, was that the machines were working-there was no malfunction.  “You just reacted too quickly.  If it went out for 5-10 more seconds, the machines would’ve gone off.  You did the right thing.”  Apparently, I was supermom, reacting before the machines even told me to react.

We left the hospital, again, in a different take-me home outfit, feeling a bit more stable, but with a growing hatred for the monitors attached to our daughter.

Not as happy on this ride home-it was very sunny, so Lily kept her eyes tightly shut until the motion put her to sleep.  I took this picture in the backseat as my husband drove us home.