Over the past four weeks in the NICU, it’s been fascinating watching our relationship with this hospital unit change. Soon after the birth of our twin boys (9 weeks early, planned c-section), I was walking briskly down the hall following a parade of respiratory therapists, a neonatal doctor, nurses and isolettes (with boys inside) to the inner sanctum of our local hopital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU.) The education of this place’s strange customs began immediately- stopped from instinctively following my boys, I was kindly given a lesson in “scrubbing up”- cracking open an iodine brush pack, rolling up my sleeves at the sink, and then scrubbing vigorously for 2 minutes to sanitize myself as much as possible.
In the time it took me to assimilate this custom of my newly adopted place, the team had unpacked our two tiny boys, placed them on open tables and blankets underneath heat lamps and had attached all sorts of wires and tubes. The cocktail of emotions I felt that day will never be forgotten: intense pride of the two beautiful babies that were joining our family, dread of their seemingly dire condition, and overwhelming love and concern from the knowledge from deep in my gut that I would do anything to bring these boys home healthy.
My feelings toward this strange place were very mixed in those first days. I knew intellectually that our preemies were receiving the best care possible at the hands of some amazing professionals, and yet deep inside I harbored anxiety toward the bright lights, the tubes and the situation we found ourselves in. “This just isn’t normal,” a remorse all the books and people we’d talked to ahead of the delivery warned us we would feel. As excited as I was each time I entered the NICU to see my boys, the place itself I subconsciously resented.
In the days that followed, Lisa was able to meet our twins in the NICU, and we both settled in for the twists and turns, ups and downs of life as we waited for our boys to progress. We met nurse after caring nurse, learned all about the monitors and how to read them, and set a routine in our new “home” with nightly vigils and mid-day check ins.
Fast forward four weeks to the holidays. At a Christmas Eve church service, we found ourselves in one of the most publicly social settings we’d experienced since Lisa went into the hospital. “How are the boys?” “Oh, you mean they’re not home?” “When will the hospital let you take them home?” All perfectly well-meaning questions, but it was hard for us to answer these questions knowing we’d never be able to bridge the gap between their polite understanding of our boy’s plight and our intimate knowledge of the world of beeps and lights that was the NICU.
Driving to the hospital that evening after the service we talked about this gap, and how, while we felt rejuvinated by the service which included a blessing of our two boys by name, we felt relief that we were “heading home.”
That evening, we hung little stockings for our boys in the NICU, and placed a wrapped present with each of them (one in a crib, the other in an isolette) in by now familiar surroundings with our loving “family” of our boys’ caregivers. After feeding we put both of them to bed with whispers of, “get some sleep so Santa can come and bring you gifts.”
It was a Christmas I’ll never forget.
The other “out of our norm” thing that sticks in my mind from the service is the shock on people’s faces when we told them our boys were nine weeks early. We expected these boys to only make it to 28 weeks gestation, or 12 weeks early so we are proud and relieved at making it to almost 31 weeks gestation. Our world of norms also includes that preemies are common. The NICU is home to nearly thirty babies on any given day and most of them are preemies. I also spent near a month on bed rest in the hospital prior to the boys’ birth. Both David and I have been sheltered by a world of my nurses and docs and then the boys’ care professionals who, when we say they made it to 31 weeks, show a face of relief and a positive nod.