July 30… Cont’d
As I looked closely I saw how very dry your skin was. It appeared like you had got a sunburn, or had been in the bath too long. Layers of dead skin peeled, you had wrinkles on wrinkles, yet the spark of who and what you were, overshadowed your woes. The dry skin would be explained by our Angel Delivery Nurse who took the time to come up and see us, a few days after you were born. She explained to me she had never seen a baby survive who had so little amniotic fluid to live in – “a teaspoon, I tell you, a teaspoon”. She also told me my placenta was very sparse, and it had been sent out for analysis to see if there could have been any contributing factors – so odd – why would my doctors not tell me this?
I was oblivious to what happened in the Delivery Room so was astonished to hear the who, what, when, where and whys. Like Nurse Florence Nightingale from ICU, she cautioned me to not have another baby in case it was hereditary and was not so lucky to have a live birth the next time around.
6:30pm
I insisted to your Dad we must go to the nursery and feed you, but I am still on IV so I need a pole, which in turn means we need a nurse, to point us in the right seek and find direction. Bad news is I am not allowed to walk, good news is they have a wheelchair with a pole that Dad can push me up to the nursery in.
Trust me, I felt foolish, like a Drama Queen seeking sympathy – after all, so many times I saw Moms who had their babies two hours before, hobble down the long hall to the nursery with out any help. I have been there, done that, having spent so long in the hospital before Wonder Boy was born and never saw a mother in a wheel chair. What was that all about? I saw the other Moms look at me, in confusion but I imagined there could be snide comments behind my back – “You saw her, she didn’t even look pregnant, no wonder a person who doesn’t even eat is in a wheel chair after the baby is born. And where is her baby, anyway, Oh, in that Special Nursery. It figures.”
In any case, I held my head high, put up and shut up and down the hall we went to the Special Nursery where there were babies with different problems although none of them were life threatening. Any baby that needed intensive care was ambulanced to our big down town hospitals where they had the machinery and apparatus to save them, if at all possible.