NICU PTSD

Sometimes I have flashbacks.

My mother and I are sitting in her SUV in the hospital's underground garage.  I have just been discharged and we are making our way through the dimly lit rows of cars to reach street level.  I am sitting with my forehead pressed against the window. As we surface I am forced back into my seat by the sun.  I've spent the last two weeks cooped up in a small white hospital room with artificial light and stale air.  This feels unnatural.  As we sit at the intersection marking the boundary between the hospital grounds and the real world, the reality of my situation crashes over me.  I can't breathe. I might scream.  If I wasn't so numb, I would jump out of the car and run back.  But all I can do is cry and picture my tiny little ones in their small white NICU rooms with artificial light and stale air. 

My mother, the maternal juggernaut, does her best to help me collect myself.  She isn't crying, but I can tell she is hurting too. And for the first time, I understand why.  She is feeling my heart ache.  I am her child. I am in pain, and there is nothing she can do about it - a feeling that I had become all too familiar with over the last few days.

Our battle with TTTS had reached its climax with the birth of our sons via Cesarean section at 28 weeks, which gave our boys a fast pass to the NICU.  They were fitted with CPAPs, IVs, and an assortment of wires.  I had to fight every maternal instinct urging me to hold them, hug them, cover them with kisses - and just let them be.  They were so small; a touch bigger than scary small.  They needed help breathing, and I would have given anything just to breathe for them for one moment, just to give their little bodies a break.  My husband and I stayed with them until I could no longer keep my eyes open.     

The next morning I attended rounds. The language was jargon heavy and I had to keep asking questions, though they didn't seem to mind.  They were placed in adjacent rooms, and it would be another month before we were all reunited in one room.  My room was one long hallway, an elevator ride, and two sets of doors away from theirs.  I could have walked there with my eyes closed. The nurses would help me take each of them out of the incubator (I was too nervous to do it on my own) and into my arms or onto my chest for kangaroo care.  In those moments - the room, the machines, the wires, the nurses - all faded away, and all I could see were my sons.  And then it was time for me to go home.

But this was all wrong.  My husband and I should be triple checking the car seats and fussing over how to buckle the boys in properly. We should be driving home at ten miles an hour.  We should be terrified, excited, worried, and beside ourselves with happiness.   Once at home, we'd revel in our first successful diaper change, feeding, bath time, and bedtime. 

Instead, we were just terrified.  
Instead, a rotation of relative strangers will be caring for our babies.

Everything felt like a lie.

I gave birth.          You still look pregnant.
I have two sons.   They shouldn't be here yet.
I am a mother.      Where are your children.

Driving away with my mother that day, I kept thinking - I am a mother. I AM a mother - while every other emotion fought for my attention.  But what do mothers do? I had skimmed through some baby books and had asked my friends with children to find some tricks of the trade, and I was prepared to deal with engorged breasts, to be covered in everything from spit to pee, to not sleep ever again, but I hadn't read anything about this.  How to be a mother while someone else cares for your babies.  

Although I wasn't going back to work, I poured myself into my new job.  Every morning I would drive to the hospital in time for rounds, eventually learning all the jargon.  I would spend as much time as I could holding my darling little ones - singing to them, talking to them.  I had my book or knitting ready for when they fell asleep.  My husband would arrive after work, and we would spend the evening together as a family, making sure to spend equal amounts of time in each room.  As we drove home at night, we would encourage each other to stay strong, that eventually they would come home.  More often than not, the night nurse would receive a phone call from me around midnight, just to check in.

We acted out our lives over the next two months.  I received emails from Baby Center telling me what size vegetable the babies would be that week in the womb.  I printed pictures of the boys to bring to my baby shower.  Ryan painted their room robin's egg blue.   And we rode the NICU roller coaster.   We knew what every number on the monitors meant.   We knew which beeps were good and which were worrisome.  We knew our As, Bs, and Ds: apnea, bradycardia, and desaturation. We learned how to change a diaper through the holes of the incubator.   During Ryan's first go at this, he diapered Sawyer's arm into the mix.  It felt good to have a new parent moment, even if it was under the watch of a nurse.  Slowly, incubators were exchanged for open air beds, and bottles replaced feeding tubes. And then it was time for them to go home.

Sawyer was coming home with oxygen and monitors.  The thought of not having a doctor no more than ten feet away was troubling.  Did they really expect us to be able to do this ourselves?  After a crash course from the nurse on CPR and how to operate an oxygen tank in which I wrote down every single word she said, we packed up two months worth of accumulated baby stuff - clothes, blankets, toys, and cards.

We dressed the boys in the beautiful hand-knitted rompers Ryan's sister made them. We quadruple checked the car seats, and Ryan drove us home at five miles an hour.

Having only held them both at the same time only a handful of times, I knew the first thing I was going to do when we arrived home.

 That was one year ago on October 6th.