Friday, November 30, 2012

Three Pound Baby Now!

She's really packing on the pounds!  Her doctors and we would like her to gain a bit more quickly as she's only averaging 10 grams per days (about a third of an ounce) over the last week, but it's in the right direction overall. She uses a lot of her calories to breathe still and so the glorious day she spent on the nasal cannula instead of the the CPAP mask that covers her pretty little face was short lived. She'll get back there, though. 

What a day it was!  We walked in to find a baby whose face we could actually see in her isolette!  We had to check to see if it was really her.  We have also been getting to hold her now nearly every time we visit. I loved seeing her little face at last. Tiny perfect lips and button nose and she opened her eyes to the sound of her daddy's voice to look toward him.  She waves her arms around and wraps her hand around M's finger tips.  We both just kept staring at her in awe that we'd made this very tiny perfect little being.  

There is something biological about that moment when you get to really look at your baby's face and marvel at those small details and fixate on the growing roundness of her cheeks and her big eyes that are looking less like alien sized eyes below her high forehead.  She moves her tiny lips and makes tiny yawns and sneezes and coughs and cries and everything seems like it really will be okay.  

I had a c-section and was under general anesthesia due to the blood thinners I was taking (lovenox at the time) so did not see her when she was delivered.  I heard someone say that the moment their baby was delivered was the best moment of her life as she looked at her little wonder.  It was delayed for me, and maybe for M also, but I feel that now, five and a half weeks after she was born, we are getting more a glimpse of that feeling.  It has been more gradual in coming for me, not a thunderbolt of wonder, but more of a well filling with love for our baby.  

At first I felt afraid to let that happen as she seemed so little and her life so precarious. We would love her and give her all we could to help her survive and pray and hope to everything we knew to keep her with us.  We tried to stay realistic though and that included fears. As the fear subsides, the love and hopes replace it. 

Yesterday when we went in she even flipped her own head over; it was quite incredible strength for such a wee one (at least in the eyes of her flabbergasted parents).  Her nurse was also impressed.  She is strong.  Her doctors from the beginning have said that--our ob team especially. They wanted to name her something powerful.  In the days it took us to decide on her name we contemplated everything from Greek godessess to mythologic creatures to family names.  We ended up with a first name we simply liked and that leaves her future relatively free from teasing and name boredom.  Her middle name means "of the sky" in Latin.  M took Latin in college and she is celestial and strong. 

In fact, the day we went in to find her off her breathing mask, we saw a rainbow on our drive into the hospital.  And as we left we saw big post storm clouds glowing as the sun sank behind them.  They are connections to something larger I like to think.  She has had so many people loving her and praying for her in her short life that I believe all of that strength and hope and love and faith adds to her growth. It takes more than medicine. 


Tuesday, November 13, 2012

We have a Baby!

She is a little tiny baby and we love her. She was born three months early weighing 1 lb and 11 oz, thanks to lupus nephritis and preeclampsia and placental reversible flow, but she is all there in miniature.  We think she's perfect. She is over two lbs now and traversing her NICU course with just a few bumps so far.

PR over, though, it's been hard.  I'm afraid to hold her. It is an odd thing to be afraid to hold your own child--any child really, but especially your own.  I'm afraid I'll break her. I've held her twice in her nearly three weeks of life so far and she was having oxygen dips the first time and then got a little cold the second time even though she was tucked down against the skin on my chest.  She has a breathing mask and feeding tube and iv line in her leg and temperature probe and respiratory monitor and heart monitor attached to her little body.  Everything is so tiny.  Moving her from her isolette to mine or M's chest is an undertaking.  The cords get tangled no matter what the nurses do to prevent it.

Most days we just let her grasp our finger with her hand.  She likes to hold her daddy's hand so hard sometimes that the tips of her tiny fingers turn white as she squeezes.  Today he told me it is one of his favorite things now.  She also seems to like it when we rest a hand on her quietly.


I dreamt last night that I was able to take her around with me but she had been born via surrogate as I was incapable of carrying her and then I had to keep going to classes and she would be there already and she was on the desk of one and so cold she was nearly dead. It was a terrible dream.  I woke up upset and misdirecting my fears and worries.  It feels unfair to not be able to have carried her longer and to not be able to be pregnant without such medical complications for both of us.  M was afraid he may have lost us both, which was unlikely but not impossible.  We spent weeks before she was born in and out of the hospital with pregnancy scares and lupus scares.  I wish it weren't that way.  I wish I didn't have lupus.  I wish I could kick it.  Because now it's affecting more than just me.  Stupid lupus.