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 32 - How grief changed me

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