Before I got pregnant, the most time I had ever spent in a hospital was in the late nineties when I worked across the road from a teaching hospital. Teaching hospitals have student doctors and student doctors have parties ... inside hospital buildings. You haven't lived until you've drunk something called a "Green Death" and then stumbled out into the night via the emergency ward.
Where was I? Oh yes, hospitals. I've never spent very much time in one as a patient, but when my son was born, suddenly I was recovering from surgery and he was a little undersized tiddler strung with tubes and wires. We got to spend a LOT of time in hospital after that.
Having your kid in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) is a very strange experience. You have a newborn baby but you also get to actually sleep because they're in the hospital and you're at home – so you can do things like go to a party or whatever you feel like doing. Which sounds great, I'm sure, but it's really not. When your baby is in NICU it's kind of like they're in jail, except you have no idea when they'll be eligible for parole.
The social worker I spoke to said that no one understands about NICU unless they've been through it. It can be a highly stressful environment for new parents – which is why they have those social workers. Most mums in the unit end up needing to talk things through with a social worker at least once. There's also a higher incidence of postnatal depression amongst mums with babies in NICU. Sometimes, if the labour was especially difficult, they can also suffer from PTSD.
It's a difficult place to be in, and I hated it with my entire being.
For one, it's very, very warm. This is for the babies and their very weak immune systems so it's with good reason, but it can suck the energy out of you, being in an overly warm room for hours at a time.
And as nice as it is to be able to sleep at night without being woken by a mewling infant, you still have to get up in the middle of the night to express milk, so you end up very tired anyway. And you end up getting dressed and making your way into the hospital so you can do at least three daytime feedings – and there's nowhere really to have a kip while you're there. They are long days in an environment that's not cosy or familiar.
And whereas most new mums get to know their babies in the privacy of their homes, you have to do it in front of nurses whose job it is to care for babies and other mothers. Your baby won't feed well? You're doing that in front of a room of people. Your baby screams his head off and won't go to sleep? You're doing that in front of a room of people. You lose your sh*t and cry because it's all too hard? You're doing that in front of a room of people.
And they're nice people (mostly), and helpful people, too, but I found it very dispiriting. The nurses keep a file and actually mark you. This is so they can chart how well the baby is taking to breastfeeding; they use numbers to indicate whether the baby has a successful latch and feeds well. Babies can't go home until they're able to feed, either from the breast or a bottle, so this is all charted. They also note how often you come in to see the baby. And it's the nurses who eventually decide when you can take your baby home. The doctors make the call on whether the baby is well enough to go home, but it's the nurses who decide whether you can cope.
We spent nearly a month in NICU, largely because my son just couldn't get the hang of feeding. We tried everything: I had two different lactation consultants, every nurse in the place offered advice, and I had my boobs handled by more middle-aged ladies than I would have imagined possible. After a while, though, you stop caring.
Then there was my not coping very well. I cried every day that my son was in hospital. In the end the social worker gave me a test to check if I was depressed. My score suggested I was borderline, but there might have been a day or two where I crossed over that border.
However, when your baby has grown enough and is feeding okay, you get to do something they call "rooming in". For a 48-hour period you stay in the ward with your baby and do all the feeds and accompanying baby-wrangling single-handedly. They have a small suite of rooms for this purpose and it's a bit like staying in a three-star hotel – except generally hotels don't make you watch a DVD about shaken baby syndrome and how to give an infant CPR right after you check in.
They weigh your baby at the start and end of the two-day stint. If the baby has put on weight during that time (ie their health is fine and you have somehow avoided making a massive cock-up), you're pretty much good to go. Still, it's a very weird thing to feel like you have to earn the right to "go forth and parent". It's like a parole board hearing.
We started rooming-in on Boxing Day last year, and the day after Boxing Day we got to take him home. That's when the really hard stuff started – but at least it was difficult in the privacy of our own home.
Being in NICU is a very strange way to start out the terrifying vocation that is parenthood – though I suspect there really is no easy version of that.
0 ความคิดเห็น:
แสดงความคิดเห็น