A Difficult Beginning (part two)

Here's the second part of our journey through a problematic pregnancy and birth. At the end of my last blog, my daughter had just been born and we were back on the ward, about to start spreading the word of her safe arrival.

The clucking sound was worrying me. Like any mother with her new born baby, I just wanted to ensure she was ok. I'd had a cesarean section, so I was numb from the waist down. I was sat useless in bed while Mr P did all the to-ing and fro-ing between our little side room and the midwives' station. Then my baby girl started to turn a blue-grey colour. Something clearly wasn't right. 

A midwife came in with a portable machine to check her blood oxygen levels. To this day I do not know what that reading said, but the midwife very calmly told me that this machine was known to be inaccurate at times and that she would just nip down to neonatal with my baby to get her checked out by the paediatric team. All the nightmares of the last 16 weeks were becoming a reality. I'd not even had chance to cuddle her properly and they were taking her away from me. Mr P looked at me, lost. I tearfully told him to go with our baby. And then I lay there and sobbed. 

The midwives wouldn't let me go to her until I had recovered from the epidural. I had to rely on text updates from my husband. Snippets of information here and there. All the while I was willing my legs to come back to life. It was early evening by the time I was allowed to be wheeled up the corridor to her. My daughter was around 6 hours old, and I'd spent less than an hour with her. She was in an incubator with CPAP tubes in her nostrils, and a feeding tube down her throat. She had more tubes in her hands, and all I could do to look after her was express milk. All my other jobs as a new mummy had been taken from me. 

That first night back on the maternity ward was horrible. Although I was tucked away in my side room, I could hear all the other new borns crying and restless. All the new mummies doing their best to settle them back down. It was torture. I'd have given anything to have my baby girl crying in the cot next to me. The night passed by in a haze of crying, expressing, trying to sleep, more crying. And then the morning came. Apparently she'd had a good night. She'd remained stable with the CPAP. She continued to be tube fed tiny amounts of my milk, and I continued to pump. I'm pretty sure I could've fed the whole neonatal unit with the amount I was expressing. It was the only useful thing I was able to do, so I made sure I did it well! 

I spent the day being chaperoned backwards and forwards between the maternity and neonatal units, by either Mr P or a midwife. Then, after tea, I was finally allowed to go by myself. As I walked into the intensive care room, my daughter's incubator was surrounded by doctors, a nurse was pulling a screen around and she ushered me out to wait in the parents room. My husband arrived as I was heading back out the door. We sat together and waited for the doctor to come. 

It turned out that the moment I walked in, they had been inserting a ventilator, apparently quite distressing for the parents to witness. My little girl had taken a turn for the worse and was needing more help than before. The doctor told us that they were contemplating transferring her to another hospital, one with a better equipped neonatal unit. She'd had all the medication our hospital had to offer, and it wasn't working. I would be transferred as a patient to their maternity ward too. For the rest of the evening, there were talks between the two hospitals to decide what was best for her. The decision to transfer was made, and both my daughter and I waited for our ambulances. It was after midnight before we left.

The journey was agonising. I just wanted to know that my precious, fragile baby girl was safe. This was the first time we'd truly been apart, not just up the corridor of the hospital. The midwife travelling with me did her best to distract me. But for the whole 40 minutes, my mind just kept going over and over 'what if something happens?'. When I arrived, her tiny ambulance was no where to be seen. By the time they'd sorted all my transfer notes out, she'd arrived and was being moved from the transport incubator into her place on the intensive care ward up in neonatal. It was 3am, I'd not slept for nearly 48 hours, but I needed to see that she was ok. I made my way up three floors to her, gave her hand a little squeeze and nodded in the chair next to her incubator until the nurse looking after her persuaded me to go and get some proper sleep. 

I returned to the maternity ward to see a line of tiny new born babies in their little plastic cots queued up outside the midwives' office. I'd never understood women who gave birth and then left their babies in the care of the midwives while they got some sleep. It made me all the more upset that my daughter wasn't with me. I slept, on and off, through the pain of my healing stitches and thinking about my baby. I was far away from home, all alone, and all I wanted was a reassuring cuddle from my husband. I had to make do with a tear filled phone call first thing until he could drive over to be with us.

I think I'll leave it there for now. There are many ups and downs to come, and I don't want to tell half a story. So again, look out for part 3 in a few days time.