Day 4 - Going home (without our baby)

Jack was born on a Monday and I got discharged from the hospital on Wednesday. We thankfully had a close by place to stay (Ike’s sister & fam had a new house with a finished basement we could commandeer) but it wasn’t our familiar space and the bigger heart ache: we came home without a baby. He was no longer just one floor down from us - he was a 10 minute drive away.

It was the worst. More terrible than a lot of our other really hard days.

I still felt like I’d been hit by a truck. Hormones raging, I was pumping every 2-3 hours, exhausted, didn’t know where any of our stuff was (Ike packed up our clothes & things that day at the hospital while I stayed with Jack & my Dad visited). I weeped. I think I sat on the floor and weeped actually. I am pretty sure I said “I can’t do this” to Ike too.

It was awful.

It got better - we developed a routine and some normalcy over the following weeks but that didn’t change the hardest part about it - our son wasn’t there with us.

We did have one little slice of solace - the NICU has little cameras on each isolette so you can log on to a site and watch the camera. So we could check it during the night if we woke up or before bed or when we woke up - basically all of the time we weren’t at the hospital. And our family could look at it too.

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Day 1 - July 12th

I have desired to write about Jack and our child rearing experiences in general for a while and I frequently push it off and it just simply isn't a "right now" priority. Starting today, on what would have been Jack's 2nd Birthday, I am going to write daily (or try to) for the next 35 days in remembrance of the 35 days he lived on this earth. It will likely be unedited, imperfect, and intentionally raw - partially for the sake of time (I work, do school and we have a toddler in foster care ok?!) and partially because that is the theme of our story, imperfection (made perfect through Christ). Today, I want to talk about birth. More specifically, medically complex birth. I get asked often if I had to have a mandatory c-section - thankfully no I did not. But I also did not expect to go into labor at 35 weeks and 5 days either and I am certain that is the worse option here. We came home from a week at the lake with Ike's family and as we are getting into bed Ike s

Day 2 - The NICU

The NICU is a place you are extremely grateful for but you also dread its existence. You are so thankful that your fragile baby has around the clock expert care but you also hate that your baby has to be there without you. And then when you are there you feel awkward - you’re the mother but his caretaker is the nurse - you have to ask permission or for help to hold the baby (so many lines/drains so it’s not easy to pick them up). It’s also just heartbreaking to see the other babies that have been there for weeks or even months. Jack’s isolette/crib/bed was next to a baby born at 24 weeks (on April 8 actually) and it was July 12… he was still tiny with a young mom who we witnessed have hard conversations about her capacity to care for such a tiny fragile baby. The baby on the other side was born via c section because his organs were on the outside of his belly (omphalocele) and he cried and cried and cried. (We actually had a mom bring a baby with this same diagnosis to our house in Ug

Day 6 - ECMO

After all that surgery talk, this seems like an appropriate time to talk about ECMO. ECMO stands for extracorporal membrane oxygenation - basically an exterior heart and lungs. Only a few hospitals in Virginia have trained teams and adequate machines to run ECMO. We learned a lot about it because there had to be someone in Jacks room 24 hours a day to monitor/run the machine. Like for bathroom breaks or lunch breaks - they had another trained ECMO person come and sit in the room while they took a break. We met almost every ECMO worker (a few didn’t do peds) and we talked with them a ton. They were present for many hard conversations with doctors, surgeons, nurses, chaplains, etc. They did things like get us lunch when the free lunch carts rolled by, bring us honey from home, update us on medical rounds that we missed. They felt like a second family. We wrote down almost all the nurses and ECMO techs Jack had - we wrote down 15 names for ECMO and I know we missed a few (like the night

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