My story Part 1 – Joshua’s birth
I’m publishing my first blog post as the first post of a series, because the story I want to tell you is content for more than just one post.
I want to start by telling a little part of my story, about when Joshua was born and I´m gonna do my best to keep it short- ish 🙂
It all started while I was pregnant with Joshua. The doctor told me, that I had a little too much amniotic fluid, but there is no need to worry. He said, that there are many potential reasons for this, but without any testing, there would be no certainty as to why or what.
(The picture below was taken 9 days before Joshua’s birth)
The time came and Joshua was born. He was as fast as a rocket. In 19 minutes he made a flash appearance and didn’t really cry. He just made a little bit of noise.
He was a tiny baby, who looked like only 33 weeks old. It seemed like he was just too young to be born already. His feet and hands, his nose and mouth were blue and his ears were flat and „glued“ to his head.
The first day flew by without Joshua crying or giving signals that he was hungry. I tried to latch him, but without any success. The nurses were very kind and were ready to help with anything. But nothing worked and we tried to give him the bottle. He was still not sucking and not crying.
You know how some babies are so tired to suck in the beginning that and they take a bottle and they’re good? Joshua was not like that. He was floppy, not crying, not really moving a lot and was sleeping most of the time.
On the 2nd day, one of the nurses couldn’t really tell just from looking at him if he was breathing or not. So she put a monitor (pulsoxymeter) to be sure, he was getting enough oxygen. And he was not… So after a couple of days we were transferred to a different section of the hospital for a closer observation. Joshua was getting worse each day. His monitor kept giving us alarms, that he would not receive enough oxygen and I kept blowing air in his face,because I did not want him being taken to NICU.
One very late night the doctor and the nurses came in our room and told us, that he needs to go to NICU, because Joshua was getting worse and they were not able anymore to help him there.
That was my nightmare coming true. I had this feeling, that they are taking my baby away. And I knew that Joshua needed help, but I couldn’t escape the pain in my heart I was facing.
At NICU he received a feeding tube and was put in a warm bed 24/7, because he couldn’t keep his body temperature by himself and therefore was always freezing.
And to my surprise, he was the „biggest“ kid on that NICU. And he never fussed or cried about anything. I learned fast how to feed him through that feeding tube and anything else, that was needed to do, because I wanted to take him home as fast as possible.
The day he was brought to NICU, I had to leave the hospital since I myself was doing physically well. So they could no longer let me stay. That means that I had to sleep at home.
So I drove back home. Alone, without Joshua. It felt like I was in a movie and all the bad things were happening to me. It was heartbreaking to go home without my baby. My elderly neighbor was on the street when I arrived. When she saw me she started crying with me. I’ll never forget her.
We never imagine something like that happening to us, right?
Well – it did. And it felt like the whole world was moving on, but me. I didn’t know how to continue with my life or how to put one foot in front of the other.
One of the things, that was also hard to understand, was why is my husband accepting everything so easily and why isn’t he heartbroken like me?
I was even mad at him, because it felt like he was not taking things as serious as I thought he needed to. But we processed things very different. While I got very emotional, he took a step back to calmly look at everything going on, so he could get the bigger picture.
It took me a while to understand that.
Now, I wanted to point this out, because I hear from so many mamas in the same situation as we were and many of them go through the same things as we did.
One of the spouses always has a harder time accepting everything and is more emotional than the other. I’ve been there, too and if I could tell myself something back then it would be: just try to be as understanding as you can and give each other grace every day because we all need it so much. Don’t think that your spouse doesn’t care as much as you do just because he/she doesn’t process things like you do or that he/she is not that emotional as you are.
Part 2 coming soon!
