Welcome Margot (Being a NICU Mom is Something That Never Goes Away)

On June 11, 2015, we welcomed our second little princess, Margot.  Margot was born full term, weighing a healthy 7 pounds and measuring a whopping 20 inches. It was a “normal” pregnancy with no complications, full of the usual pregnancy side-effects, resulting in a newborn girl who smiled within hours of being delivered, revealing enormous dimples in both cheeks, and shining blue eyes. And the only thought running through my head was, “Do I get to keep you? Can I take you home?” Every shift change required the same explanation: no, she’s not my first, but we were in the NICU for 11 weeks with the first one so this is new to us, I don’t know what to do with a newborn, yes I know I do an excellent swaddle-the NICU nurses taught me well.

But before she arrived, I had to make it through the pregnancy.

Being a NICU mom is something that never goes away.  The horrifying emergency c-section, the memory of wires and medications and potential surgeries, seeing your child intubated, unable to move, trapped in a plastic cage where your touch is irritating to her paper-thin skin; both you and she are helpless.  You’re not really a mom and she’s not really your child. Because being a NICU mom is something that never goes away. The trauma does not disappear and it only resurges once you are presented with similar circumstances: pregnancy and the potential for going through it all again. Even making the decision to get pregnant brought tearful conversations and gut-wrenching self-doubt. Because being a NICU mom is something that never goes away. And only other NICU moms can understand. If you’re not a fellow NICU mom you can try to empathize and relate and comfort, but you will never truly understand, and that’s okay. We don’t want you to go through what we went through (we don’t wish that on anyone), but you can’t walk a mile in my shoes because you weren’t sitting there for 11 weeks, unable to bring your baby home from the hospital.  Because being a NICU mom is something that never goes away.

Because of all the (no medical explanation available) complications with Lily, we were being followed very closely, by my OBGYN, by my endocrinologist, and by my new perinatologist, the amazing Dr. Z. Slight flashback is necessary.  Because we knew by week 20 that something wasn’t quite right with Lily, we were frequent fliers at MFM (our hospital affiliated sonography center), and our perinatologist left much to be desired-unkempt, wearing a too tight top and a too short skirt, she never received my vote of confidence. She would postulate and suggest and hum and haw in circles, completely uninformative blather, and I never felt like I was getting adequate care. So this time around, I complained, and not in that passive aggressive way that women are famous for. I made it very clear that I would not see Dr. Awful again, and that if they sent her in my room, I would simply leave.  I out-rightly refused to see her.  Why does making yourself seem like the most difficult patient in the world often result in getting the best care?  Enter Dr. Z, a brilliant, neurotic angel sent from heaven to resolve all my insecurities. She ran every test, twice, explained all possible outcomes, what the numbers meant, what the growth scan estimates really estimated. She actually understood that we were simply waiting for the other shoe to drop and she agreed that our anxieties were completely valid-she even once called me, on my cell, 5 minutes after we left the center, just so she could go over another blood test with us.  When routine bloodwork showed something off by 1 one hundredth of a gram, she re-ran a whole battery of tests to allay both my and her fears.  She was Woody Allen and Jonas Salk combined, but with Gene Simmons’ hair and a complete lack of affect-imagine Lorne Michaels’ voice, slightly more feminine, and there you have it. 

Do you like the word normal?  I’m not a big fan, but when it comes to your doctor telling you that your baby’s growth is normal and that your pregnancy is normal and that all your test results are normal, you learn to love it.  We’d never heard the word normal before in relation to a pregnancy or a baby.  Dr. Z used it every time we saw her.  And we cried tears of relief. She was my spirit animal.

Dr. Z’s confidence was amazing, and it certainly helped to curtail my NICU mom brain, but it couldn’t stop the fears and worries in their entirety (I needed to stop having NICU nightmares were I gave birth and the doctors wouldn’t give her back to me-I was having those on a nightly basis). And it certainly didn’t help misguided friends and relatives who could not understand why my husband and I were still anxious.  “But the doctor said it’s normal, so stop worrying.” I can’t say it enough: because being a NICU mom is something that never goes away. You are so unbelievably misguided in your attempts at relating to me if you think that repeatedly hearing the word “normal” suddenly makes the horror and pain of everything we went through, and the fear that it could happen again, dissolve like early morning fog.

39 weeks later, there she was, perfect (minus some slight jaundice), no wires, no medications, no barriers…just mine-I got to keep her.

Margot-10 days old!