Mar
01

29 Weeks Old.

In predictably unpredictable NICU fashion, Simone had a difficult day after my last entry. She stopped peeing, her oxygen needs increased, and she had her first bad nurse, a woman who both failed to find me charming and kept slamming the isolette portholes even after I asked her to for the love of god stop DOING that. She pooh-poohed my concerns about Simone’s blood pressure and it wasn’t until my favorite nurse practitioner drove out of her way on her day off to check on us that medications got ordered and the peeing restarted in earnest. That evening Simone turned the mythical corner we had been hearing so much about and THE OSCILLATOR was banished forever. And the next morning they found Bad Nurse’s body face down in a drainage culvert, a note reading NOT WITHOUT MY DOPAMINE crumpled in her mouth.
Back on the conventional ventilator we had two excellent days and then a less-than-good day and then a marginally bad day followed by a greatly improved evening. This is how we move forward here, via a herky-jerky sort of tango, back a little after every stride ahead, an ET tube in place of a rose clutched in our teeth.

But we are moving forward—Simone is now eating two milliliters of my very own milk every two hours, which means I can add “nourishing” to my so-far limited repertoire of mothering tasks (“hovering” and “hand-wringing” making up the bulk of said repertoire). When nurses, machines, and a stunning variety of plastic products are attending to nearly all of your baby’s needs, it is easy to feel superfluous. Feeding her, even if with the help of a hospital-grade pump, a syringe, and an OG tube, seems like a step towards a more normal motherhood, a motherhood as yet in the future, where my milk let-down reflex is no longer triggered by my baby’s oxygen alarm.

But the most exciting development of the past few days started Wednesday morning, when Simone raised her eyebrows and I saw a pinprick opening at the corner of her eye. Her eyelids were starting to unfuse, and that afternoon I was holding her up in her isolette so that the nurse could remove a drooled-upon blanket, when one eye slid open and stared straight at me. I very nearly dropped her in surprise, and by the time Scott heard my cry of “Her EYE opened!” and scrambled to my side, the eye was closed again. And closed it remained, until yesterday evening when Simone lay on her stomach, chomping on a tiny pacifier as I obligingly held it in her mouth. Then, with a great deal of effort and vigorous eyebrow activity, she opened the eye not mashed into the blanket and looked around.
“Hi! Hi sweetie! Hiii!” I burbled into the porthole. Scott and I watched her watch us for a few seconds before her eyelid drooped back down, and then she struggled to raise it again, peering at us in a charmingly unfocused way as she gnawed busily.

And now, some pictures:
Here I am, holding Simone this morning for the first time since her surgery. I can’t tell whether it is the unflattering perspective or just Simone’s diminutive size, but I look like a giant, a delighted giant holding a human baby she found abandoned on the forest floor:
Holding Simone

And here is Simone one hour later, fast asleep with her mouth hanging open, dreaming her girlish dreams of extubation:
Asleep
Please ignore the crazed camera-wielding mother reflected in the isolette.

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |