Looking back on my blog, I never talked in detail about my ordeal where two of my children were hospitalized last summer, weeks apart from each other, the back to back heartbreak of a mother's eternal worry and wishing that our children will be OK.
When faced with a situation where the reality is they just might
not be, I found the mind and body kicks into this strange state of overdrive, a too calm desperation difficult to describe. You are so scared you become numb, in shock I suppose, until you hear the good news you've been praying for and finally get to go home.
You operate in this upper echelon of existence where everything becomes muted and miniature. Meals don't matter. If you happen to make it outside the hospital walls and the sun is shining, the light you see the outside world through renders everything else unimportant. The only thing that really matters is your immediate concern about if your babies will make it and what you have to do in order to get them there.
If that means administering the nastiest tasting medicine made to a 1 year old every 8 hours, waking him up in the middle of the night to pin him down and squirt antibiotics strong enough to kill an infection of the bones surrounding the spine, fine. If that means repeated sedation for MRI's that take a day for the drugs to wear off, whatever.
If it means doing a spinal tap on a 5 week old preemie with a fever from an unknown origin, alrighty then. Or placing her on isolation in a metal institutional crib where nurses and doctors crept into her hospital room at all hours of the night in head to toe E.T. gear, get r done. Get my baby well.
At the time I felt like I was being tested, hit with punch after sucker punch to the gut. The universe was on a roll and all I could do was ride it out and hope the story unfolded favorably my way. As if it weren't enough stress on a person to endure two pregnancies in less than two years, recover from reoccurring c-sections, while breastfeeding or pumping milk for newborns non-stop every two hours, all the while caring for a 15 month old.
Everyday was a struggle just to survive new-routine activities.
Just managing the logistics of the daily life was a constant challenge. How do you get the tiniest of mouths to two swollen massive breasts at once, or even fix and bottle feed two screaming, hungry babies? All the while still tending to the other baby 'Big' Brother needing to be constantly fed, changed, and entertained?
How do you feed yourself somewhere in there or maybe squeeze in a shower every few days or find the time to just freaking use the bathroom.... or SLEEP!? There are three of them and one of me, and even with my husband and I tag teaming, we will always be outnumbered.
Here's one way we did it!
Carly was my eater. She was ready to eat the moment she entered the world, so wide eyed, mouth rooting. She was the smaller one, but baby girl has been HUNGRY ever since!
Alyssa was whisked away to the neo-natal nursery immediately upon delivery, so it was just me and Carly chilling in the post-op room together as Daddy paced the halls awaiting news of Alyssa. Carly, so wide eyed and ready for the world. She had the biggest bug eyes you ever saw, always observing. For 5 pounders at birth, which is pretty good for twins, they looked so alien!
Breast feeding with her was more natural than it had ever been with Bryce. I quit after one month of struggling with him. Carly ate like a champ within the first hour she was born. She kept my milk flowing enough to pump some into a bottle for Sissy.
Alyssa always had trouble eating. I don't know if it was because I didn't see her again to even attempt breastfeeding until more than six hours after her birth, or if coming into the world inhaling a lung full of amniotic fluid messed her up, but she has always been my difficult eater. Talk about double duty! She preferred a bottle filled with milk I had to pump every two hours, sometimes while I would be feeding Carly on one side, I had the pump going on the other.
We were all released from the hospital at the same time and during the first few days at home, I remember just being terrified. They were
so little. So tiny and fragile, and I wasn't a rookie on the parenting front, but this was a whole new challenge altogether. We had one hospital run a few days into it with Carly who had a rattle to her chest and slight congestion and this weird white foam coming out of her mouth. Turns out she was fine, her body's way of expressing leftover gunk from childbirth.
I think God might have been doing a little foretelling with this mini-hospital run, because a month later, the real ordeal began.
The weekend started off promising, even though I was missing my first Derby in a lifetime. My whole pregnancy I had always envisioned the great unveiling of my babies to all my friends at the neighborhood Derby party, all of us in coordinating outfits saying, "Look at me! Look at our Happy Family, Bitches!"
But with the babies still on home quarantine, my parents took Bryce to a party while my husband and I manned the home front. The girls had an uneventful day not watching horse races and we celebrated, breaking open a peach bottle of wine I had been saving from Huber's Farm for a special occasion and mixing frosty beverage in our honeymoon glasses, a nod to an era that seemed so far away for only being a year or so back on the calendar!
No sooner as we started getting a little loose, girl's rocking life away in their swings (God Bless those things), robe falling off the shoulder, husband's eyes straying a little lower...
Pitter patter of tiny feet upstairs, party over. Parents and Big Brother are home, even before the big race. It was still a peaceful, fleeting moment in time.
Doesn't there always seem to be a moment, the cliched 'calm before the storm'?
The next evening, Alyssa awoke from a nap drenched in sweat. Warm to the touch. Damn, I guess we had her too snug in a rug, still swaddled in her bassinet. 'Fever' never occurred to me at this point. As the night passed, she wasn't eating and became less responsive. I did the dreaded anal temp check and holy shit 101.9, that ain't good.
I called the doc on call, and they said normally that is not an alarming temp for a baby, but anytime there is a fever over a certain degree in a newborn, an immediate trip to the emergency room is required. The source of what is causing the fever must be determined quickly.
Kosair ER on a Sunday night after Derby is not the place you want to be. Keep in mind this is during the Swine Flu scare, so before we even entered the packed waiting room full of sniffling, coughing infectious children, we had to do a Swine Flu check. WTF? I was slipping into panic mode more and more. They tried to hussle us into the general public and Mama Bear came out.
Most of my family members had never even met the girls yet because I was so paranoid about them getting sick. At our doctor's recommendation, we placed them and ourselves on a home quarantine and were waiting until their 8 week check up to get the all clear for visitors. And the immediate family who came out anyways had to wear fresh, clean clothes that hadn't been infected by germs from work or school or the grocery store and practically had to bathe in antibacterial gel before handling them. I still don't think I was being too over protective and they wanted me to expose her to that crap?
Here is a 5 week old preemie who has never been exposed to other people period, and they want me to take her in the belly of the beast and mingle with the obviously ill babies and snot nosed 5 year olds? Hell no. I fought and refused to go back out there until they gave us a secluded room to wait in. And the waiting began.
A nightmare of a continuously spiking fever. By the time they got to us in the ER the next morning, an immediate spinal tap was ordered to rule out meningitis. Collected blood samples and urine specimens were sent out for a variety of tests. They took her away to insert a tiny needle in her small spine to remove some spinal fluid. I could hear her screams as I sat in that little ass room with a borrowed breast pump and expressed my milk that was statrting to painfully clog in my milk ducts from going too long between feedings. Poor Carly wasn't around to empty me out and if I didn't send some milk home for her soon, she would have to be fed formula. Alyssa wasn't eating period.
We were moved to a reverse isolation room where anyone entering was required to wear full hospital protective gear and masks to prevent her from being exposed to anything. It was a big room with this small prison crib in the middle made of metal bars and she was the most pitiful thing you ever say laid up in the middle of that big bed hooked up to wires and whimpering from pain. Into the next night I held her continuously, only placing her in that horrible contraption to pee or pump.
That was one of the loneliest nights of my life. My husband at home with the other two, watching my daughter fight off something we still didn't know anything about, the fear of the unknown paralyzing and protecting me from losing it. You find a strength that you didn't know existed during times like that. I understand now how people lift cars off the wreckage of an accident to free their children because you will do anything for them and what a horrible feeling when you can do nothing but sit there and wait.
When they finally diagnosed her with a severe urinary tract and kidney infection and began treating with antibiotics through her IV, hope crept back in. We knew what we were dealing with and it was all to familiar to me. I knew the routine all too well when they did the tests the next day to check her for the same condition I suffered from as a child, where there is a malfunction in a valve inside allowing urine to flow backwards up into the bladder and kidneys while peeing.
After three days of no sleep and missing my other child so bad it hurt inside, and not just my boobs from non-stop pumping and no natural feedings, we were finally released. What a homecoming!
And yet still, this was just another preparation for round three coming two weeks later. 5 more days at Kosair, IVs and MRIs on a 15 month old, wagon rides around a place that was sadly becoming comfortable, mention of the 'C' word and tumors terrifying the shit out of parents who just wanted their babies to all be better.
