Hellobee

May 31st 5 years ago was a Friday. It was a boiling hot day in the DC area, notable because the week before was still sweater weather at a baseball game we went to for our 5th wedding anniversary. I had a full day of work and a 36 week pregnancy checkup, and because it was so hot and my husband’s schedule at work was light, he offered to drive me to the doctor’s office instead of me walking and taking the train as usual.

I had a picture perfect pregnancy, by all accounts. I had zero morning sickness, and the only time I felt sick was when I ate too fast, a habit I needed to get rid of anyway. I craved only the healthiest food, and seemed to lose taste for my favorite cupcakes and Cheez-its. I gained only a few pounds, and other than an uptick in heartburn, it was often hard to tell I was pregnant. At every checkup, however, the baby kept measuring small, and I always asked about whether there was anything to worry about, but the doctors always told me that the measurements are often imprecise, that my husband and I are both short people so we can’t expect our baby to be large, “someone has to round out the curve on either side,” and so on, and she was a very active kicker, so I never really worried.

My husband circled the block while I went for my check-up, expecting the usual in and out. The OB-GYN practice I used at the time had me rotating doctors every check-up because anyone could be on call for my delivery and they wanted me to get to know them, so this time, there was another new face. She asked me the usual questions as I got ready for my physical check, she felt for the baby and said that she was in breech position so we’d be keeping an eye on that, and completely offhand, I mentioned that the baby must dislike the summer as much as her mom because she wasn’t as actively kicking in the last couple days that it had gotten really hot.

Who knows why that doctor decided to do an extra checkup on me that day. She could have easily dismissed that comment as the small talk that I intended it to be, but something made her pause. She asked if I had time to stay for an ultrasound, and I did, so I texted my husband and told him I’ll be a little longer and went to the ultrasound room. The doctor went in with me, and noticed immediately that while baby was physically OK, she hadn’t shown any growth since my 32 week checkup. She had continuously measured small from the start, but she’d been growing, even if slowly. In those 4 weeks, though, she hadn’t gained any weight, so a half hour later, I got in the car and told my husband that we had to go home and pack a bag.

Baby C was born 26 hours later, at 4 lbs 6 oz and 16 inches. She was perfectly healthy, but tiny. Because the induction didn’t take as planned, she was born via c-section, and I didn’t get to see her until she was a few hours old, and it would be 10 days before we would take her home. The doctor who delivered her explained to me that I had a tiny placenta, a condition of IUGR. Because I had no risk factors, I was never monitored for it, and even if I had been, there’s little that can be done to affect the outcome in most cases.

Baby C spent 10 days in the NICU. Even though she had no medical issues to speak of, the doctors wanted to see her gain weight and hold body temperature on her own. This part of our parenting experience is not one I talk about often, particularly because when it comes to NICU experiences, we’re in the luckier group, having had a pretty healthy newborn who just needed some extra monitoring. But I realized in hindsight, around Baby C’s 18 month birthday, that the NICU experience was actually much more traumatic than I had allowed myself to believe. Starting with not being able to see my newborn due to the c-section recovery, to the day I had to leave the hospital without her, and then eventually with her. Unsurprisingly, I had a very hard time breastfeeding because not only was Baby C so tiny, she didn’t have much energy to figure it out with me, she also needed to gain weight fast so we deployed formula right away. I have no regrets about that experience, but for the 6 weeks that I did struggle with pumping and wanting to breastfeed, it was a very real frustration. The day I was released from the hospital, I told my husband that our first stop had to be at Target to print photos of her to put around the house. To this day, five years later, that memory makes me tear up. She had incredible care in the hospital that we were at, and I spent every day there for 6 days before her release and after mine, from 9-6, feeding her bottles, pumping, doing skin to skin time, and hanging out in the cafeteria in between, and then calling the hospital in the evening to check on her.

Every year that Baby C marks a birthday, the first ten days are a bit rough for me. Facebook and Timehop show me all the truly amazing pictures of my tiny little girl, and I reread all the well wishes and comments from friends we received then, and along with that, all the memories of going home without her and the hindsight reflection on how much that affected the first two years of my parenting experience really hit me. It became undeniable that I had some very real postpartum anxiety for the first year of Baby C’s life, and I realized much later that to some extent it was a post-traumatic reaction to our sped-up birth story.

I share this story today, as my daughter turns 5, because I want all the moms who may be reading this in the NICU or may be reflecting on their own NICU stories, to know that I get it, and advise them to do something I didn’t, to my own detriment. Reach out to friends and family. Let them be there for you. I convinced my mom not to come until after we got home because I didn’t think it’d be worth her vacation time to sit around the hospital with me. On reflection now, I really could have used her presence then. I convinced my husband to go to work – no use for both of us to sit around the hospital – but I should have asked him to be there with me, even if we just stared at our phones together. I want anyone who’s reading this who may know a parent in the NICU to reach out to that parent and offer them company. The best gift I got in that time was a friend whose son is 8 months older than my daughter, who was also a NICU baby, coming over to the hospital to just sit with me. When your MLM friends do fundraisers for NICUs, support them. NICU moms don’t often know what they’ll need – it’s an experience that you’re thrust into so quickly, you don’t get your wits about you to think about coolers for pumped milk, lunch boxes, and the fact that you have no clothes for this tiny person who showed up early. I’ve really appreciated seeing some friends donate totes and coolers to NICUs for moms who need them.

Baby C is headed to kindergarten in August. She’s a spunky adventurer who’s never met a wall she won’t climb (literally), a Lego set she won’t build, or a puzzle she won’t solve. She’s a princess and unicorn obsessed girly girl, and never without her superhero gear. And she fits her Gemini star sign description to a tee, so perhaps she was always meant to be an early baby. I know when I was hanging out in that hospital cafeteria, reading stories of ‘”where are they now” NICU babies really helped me through that anxious time, and Baby C’s story will help someone too.

5 hours old. Almost 5 years old.