After my visit with Henry in my postpartum room, two nurses? doctors? - I'm not really sure - came from the NICU to take him upstairs. I was so upset and so scared as they wheeled him out. Brian went up to the NICU with them so he could see them get him settled in and I don't even vaguely remember what I did in the meantime although pictures seem to indicate that I watched Dinosaur Train with Oliver on my iPad.
A few hours later my anesthesia had worn off enough for me to try to get up if I felt up to it. I did, of course, since I knew that the sooner I got up the sooner I could see Henry again. I got up and walked to the bathroom and back. A few hours after that I was ready to get up and head to the NICU (in a wheelchair, obviously. At Seton the postpartum rooms are on the second floor of one wing and the NICU is on the eighth floor of another. Some really poor planning. And, of course, my room what the furthest from the NICU. I think that was because they wanted to put me as far away from rooms with babies in them).
They wheeled me up to the unit and Brian walked me through the steps of getting into the unit. You get a passcode you have to give them every time in order to buzzed into the unit. Then you have to go straight to the sinks and wash and sanitize your hands like you're scrubbing in for surgery basically. The unit is made up of six bays that hold eight babies each - four on either side of a middle aisle. Each baby's area has a curtain that can be pulled for privacy but for the most part it is all open. Henry was in bay five - the first baby on the left of the bay.
We got up to his bedside and I sat there and cried looking at him hooked up to the oxygen. At this point he had a cannula in his nose and they were trying to push room air into him (that is, they were pushing 21% oxygen and trying not to have to push a higher percentage). But he was breathing pretty rapidly. I seem to remember that they let me try nursing on that first visit (in subsequent visits I wasn't allowed to nurse him as his respiratory rate was much too high but I can't remember if I was allowed to try during the first or second visit). He wasn't too interested in nursing so I just held him for a bit and cried. A doctor came and talked to us about his treatment and said that they were going to try to keep pushing the oxygen through the cannula in his nose but that if he continued to struggle to breathe they would put him on a CPAP. They also had started an IV so they could push some antibiotics in. They weren't sure if his struggles were from an infection at that point so they wanted to push the antibiotics just in case (they were waiting on test results to see if there was an infection present). I asked the doctor how long he thought Henry would be there and he said that it could be anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.
All I could think as the doctor explained to me how hard it was for Henry to breathe was how much I had wanted us to do the c section that day and how horrible I felt because he obviously wasn't ready. The only thing that kept me from completely blaming myself for his stay in the NICU is the conversation I had with Dr. Reich at my bedside earlier that morning. When I had asked her if my anxiety could have a say in whether we delivered Henry that day or not and she said no. If not for that no I'm not sure I would have been able to stop myself for feeling fully responsible for his struggles and time in the NICU. Besides, during all of those anxious days after my second bleed, I had told Brian repeatedly that I was ready for someone else to be able to take care of Henry - that I couldn't handle the burden of being solely responsible for his well being anymore - and that was exactly what I had now... an army of nurses and doctors to take over where I had left off.
I made that first visit to the NICU a short one since I was still feeling the effects of my surgery. I headed back to my room and began my rigorous pumping schedule - pumping every three hours during the day and four hours at night (so, I was a pretty lucky new mom and got to sleep four hour stretches for the first nights of his life).
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