My baby boy – Everything is going to be okay

Intro and Part 1

Everything is going to be okay. This is the mantra my husband recited to me before the birth of my baby boy in July 2016. I didn’t believe him, and I spent the last month of my pregnancy in the grip of continuous mood swings and panic moments. Because my husband knows and loves me, he knows that I process and communicate emotions and situations far better through writing than any other method, so he bought me a notebook…

Date 02/07/2016 – The birth of my baby boy

Everything is going to be okay. I have to keep telling myself this. I lay on the bed trying to make my toes twitch, desperate for sensation to return below my diaphragm.

Words describing the condition of my baby’s lungs, his hypoglycemia, the potential for moving him if they don’t improve. All of these words and hurried conversations that I can’t understand. The minimal information that is passed along when they think they are being helpful.

What is Ticky-Tocky-Wostsit? why have I only seen my baby for five minutes? I’m supposed to try to feed him within the first hour after he’s born. Why are you milking me like a cow? Why can’t me baby feed from me?

So many questions that I need to ask, but feel incapable of articulating.

I want to get up. Everything I’ve read says that being up and about within the first 6 hours after a c-section id beneficial to a quick recovery. If someone would help me up I could go and see my baby. I need to see my baby, Please.

They finally brought him to me. He did feed. I was so proud of him and of myself when they admitted that he was feeding better from me than from them (which is what they had been trying to keep him in his incubator). I was so joyfully relieved that I was producing the colostrum he needed. That his hypoglycemia was correcting and that he wouldn’t need to move even farther away from me. I was petrified of having my baby so far away from me, and that it would have been my fault because I had gestational diabetes.

Laying alone in my room, I could hear the cry of every baby in the nursery, right next door to my room. How do mums of preemies and sick babies cope with the separation? My heart is breaking with every passing minute that I don’t see my baby boy.

I know that he is in the best place to help his lungs clear, but every hour I was sending my Honey to check on him. I wanted to go, too, but my legs were not yet working and they hadn’t allowed me to get up.

The first night alone was hellish. Listening for every cry, and hoping that my baby boy would come to join me. No sleep for me. I need to be awake for him.