Imaginative Mondays
It might have been more conventional to start a new theme for your blog in the new year, but I have never been conventional. So today I've decided that from now on Mondays will be for creative writing. Sometimes it will be fiction, and other times, like today, it will be creative non-fiction.Holding
The day began, as most did then, in the middle of the night. I woke into semi-darkness, feeling the sweat on my back turn cold.
Outside my room, fluorescent lights flickered above pale blue walls. I shuffled along the corridor to the nurses’ station. I met so many doctors and nurses, so many names forgotten. Even the nurse's face is vague now, a smile surrounded by brown curly hair. The smile was what mattered, the hands reaching out to me, the gentleness of her voice as she said, “Couldn’t you sleep?”
I shook my head.
She invited me to sit down. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said.
“How did you know what I was thinking?” I asked, trying to smile.
She knew why I was there. Earlier that evening she had invited me to come. Now she asked, “Would you like me to ring the Newborn Unit and find out how your baby is?”
“Yes, yes, please."
The baby was fine, was sleeping.
Terror eased back to the same gnawing anxiety that followed me everywhere, that lay back down with me in a clammy bed. It lay awake for hours with me, and filled my dreams until the next sweat-soaked awakening.
Daylight brought a sunny August morning. My baby, due in November, was over a day old, and I had yet to hold her. At breakfast in the dining room, women with massive bellies moaned to each other. “I’ve been here with my feet up for a month and nothing’s happened,” one said. “I’m going home where I’m needed.”
Food stuck on the lump that had formed in my throat. I wanted to scream at them to shut up, to say I would gladly swap places with them, would sit still for three months if it would bring my baby back inside me. I fled from the dining room in tears.
Later, my husband and toddler came. Jerry held Melissa in his arms and gestured, “See the baby.”
Melissa turned, not to her sister, but to the boy a neighbouring cot, who lay with his head in a Perspex box. He looked like a baby. Melissa’s sister didn’t. She looked like a miniature old woman. Her face was bruised and puffy, her skin was dark pink and covered in downy hair. A hat on her tiny head held in place the tubes that helped her breathe. More tubes provided the food she needed, which wasn’t the breast milk I expressed several times a day. That would be needed soon, or so the nurses said, but for now she was drip fed something they called TPN. They patiently explained this stood for Total Parenteral Nutrition, a mixture of electrolytes and minerals.
Over the weeks and months that followed those things would become familiar, and words like TPN and sats, for oxygen saturation, would slide into our vocabulary. But that day I had as little idea what electrolytes were as I did why the baby boy had his head in that box. Now it seems obvious that it contained oxygen, but till then I’d had no experience of intensive care units. I felt equally bewildered by the monitors that flashed and pinged above our baby. Wires entwined her, connecting sensors on her chest and back and feet to those flashing monitors.
It wasn’t my fault. Nurses said so; doctors said so. But that day, I still didn’t believe them. When a friend came to visit, having driven a hundred miles, I thought she was passing through the city on her way somewhere else. I couldn’t believe she’d come to see me, I couldn’t understand why she’d brought flowers, and even less why she’d given me a card that read, “Congratulations on the birth of your baby.” I’d done nothing to deserve congratulations.
That evening, near eight o’ clock, I went back up to the Newborn Unit. The Intensive Care room was full of nurses at shift change. Someone showed me to a waiting room. I stood feeling embarrassed, as if I should have known, shouldn’t have been such a nuisance.
A nurse appeared in the doorway. “I’m Theresa,” she said, “and you’re Louise’s mum aren’t you?” She explained that in the past premature babies had all their physical needs met in hospital, but the experience left them bad-tempered on getting home. She explained how babies needed to be touched and held. She told me about containment holding, where the parent places both hands on the baby in the incubator. She explained that massage helped babies realise touch wasn’t just needles and pain, and she told me about kangaroo care, when the baby was held skin-to-skin on the parent’s chest.
“Would you like to hold Louise?” she asked.“Oh,” I said, thinking she would show me how to containment hold. “Yes.”
Theresa knew better, and led me to a chair by the incubator. It took two nurses to carry Louise over. She weighed 1.1 kilos or two pound, six and three quarter ounces (every fraction mattered) so it wasn’t her massive bulk that created the challenge, but all the wires and tubes. They placed her upright on my chest, showed me how to hold her and covered us with a blanket.
With my baby against my chest, the part of me that had been missing was found again. I felt her tiny feathery movements, the warmth of her body against my own, I smelled her baby aroma among all the hospital smells – and I was a mother again. I could breathe again, relax, let tears flow.
