I’m realizing that I’m still kind of angry and messed up from Ember’s NICU stay. While it was all happening I remember just thinking that at least she’s okay, at least it’s nothing major, at least I’m able to be here with her, at least I can pump and nurse, at least the nurses are great. There were a lot of “at least”s. Plus I was so tired and I had no idea what the next day would look like so I just lived day to day, hoping for improvement, hoping she could go home, hoping she didn’t have another episode.<\/p>\n
But when I look back at it I realize it really messed with our bonding. The pregnancy felt a little weird to me all the way through – not bad, but just not the same as my other two pregnancies. I was really, really looking forward to holding her, feeling her in my arms, kissing her, nursing her. But I only got to hold her for a couple minutes after birth, then she was gone and we were left in an empty room wondering what the hell just happened. It felt like I hadn’t given birth at all. No visitors, no baby to hold and fawn over, no videos to take. Just silence. It felt way too similar to my first birth… except of course she was upstairs and alive and healthy. At the time everyone said I was being so strong. In hindsight I think I just shut off, went into emergency functioning mode.<\/p>\n
I have known a lot of scary stories, of long NICU stays with very sick, very tiny babies. My baby was neither very sick nor very tiny, so I guess I felt it wasn’t valid for me to feel upset about it. But it was<\/i> upsetting. A week-long hospital stay with no one really giving us straight answers as to what was going on and what we could expect was not<\/i> what we had hoped for when I had such a lovely, easy, uncomplicated birth. An event that should have been full of celebration felt like a non-event. Not to mention how unsettling it was to come home without the baby.<\/p>\n
When we did bring her home I had this 1 week old that I barely knew. I felt like the NICU nurses knew her and cared for her. She was perfectly happy being put down – it was probably the most familiar to her. It felt like I brought home someone else’s baby… like she wasn’t mine. I didn’t know her, she didn’t seem to need me at all except to eat, she didn’t even like being cuddled. It took a long time to feel like someone wasn’t going to come take her away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m realizing that I’m still kind of angry and messed up from Ember’s NICU stay. While it was all happening I remember just thinking that at least she’s okay, at least it’s nothing major, at least I’m able to be here with her, at least I can pump and nurse, at least the nurses are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4223"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4223\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4224,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4223\/revisions\/4224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}