(For those who have not heard me tell this story.
This was written when my memories were still fresh and the emotion raw of the day I almost lost my little girl)
In January 2008 I was in the last two months of my pregnancy. This was significant for many reasons. I knew for sure that this was to be the last. I had a lot of difficulties and was heading toward preeclampsia. Labor was induced three weeks early and my daughter was born on Feb. 10th. She has some trouble breathing at first and they didn’t let me see her right away. Scary.
Secondarily, because I was on a state program for health insurance, I was forced to give birth in a hospital a little over an hour away from home. My other two children were only 3 and 4 at the time so I spent almost the entire recovery time alone. Then, to top it off, I came home with a raging cold.
I barely remember much that first four weeks of her life other than fighting with breast feeding, sleepless nights, and tons of diapers. Then, she got sick. For one night, she cried almost the entire night. No matter how much we tried to console her, she was relentless. By the time morning came around she went quiet, which we both believed was pure exhaustion. However, I noticed something was off, she was more than exhausted. She was lethargic.
Worried, we took her to the ER and once the nurse looked at her color and checked her oxygen, we were all rushed into a room right away. Doctors were soon to follow and suddenly out of nowhere the room burst into a flurry of action and no one told us why. Little did we know, she had stopped breathing. People with carts and nurses all rushed around and I had no idea what was going on. It was terrifying.
It was handled well and she was stabilized quickly, then put up in the NICU. The doctor on her case told us that they had to do some procedures. Since she had to go on a ventilator, they had to put in a feeding tube. She told us to go eat dinner since it would take an hour or so and we had nothing to worry about.
We ate casually and came right back, to where they escorted us to the waiting room. We waited… and waited. An hour passed since we got back and I started to worry. Two more hours of worried waiting and I was about to tear my hair out. Finally the doctor came in with an impossible to read expression. She said calmly, “We almost lost her.”
My heart, and nearly me, dropped to the floor. I listened as she tried to explain what happened, but all I could hear was that she was at least stable again, but not out of the woods. It was pneumonia, and a particularly vicious one at that. In the very least they had to hook her up to a ventilator to keep up her oxygen levels.
The next morning she was transferred to another hospital, nearly an hour away in the opposite direction, to a more staffed and equipped NICU. For two weeks I drove back and forth to the hospital twice a day to just sit there and watch her as she just lay there hooked up to several different machines, unable to hold her. It took the breath out of me but I held it together.
After 9 days on a ventilator she was finally breathing on her own and I was able to hold her and feed her. Forget breastfeeding now… especially since I never really had any success with it before anyway. It took them 5 more days of making sure she ate enough and her oxygen stayed above 95% before they finally let me take her home again.