I find myself doing this quite often especially when my birthdays roll around... I will be older than I feel on my good days and much younger than I think the mirror reflects especially when those stressful days rear their ugly heads and disrupt my happy contentedness!
Just yesterday, I was 24 pregnant with my daughter... still dreaming of that fairy tale we were embarking on. Life made sense most of the time then. We didn't have much but we thought we had it all! After her birth, the fairy tale twisted into some dark ugly nightmare straight out of Tim Burton's head...
Nothing made sense.
We had lost everything... after all... what else mattered if this little creature sent from Heaven didn't make it home with us?
Outside, the sun was shining, birds chirped, children laughed and swam and enjoyed summer to it's fullest, but for me... time stood still... trapped in this God Forsaken darkness. Days rolled into one another like waves crashing onto the shore... each day seemed dimmer than the last... anger and resentment took over my heart and soul... nothing else mattered except that little tiny child who had progressively became sicker and sicker. I hated everyone and everything around me...
Where was the beauty?
Where were the sugar plum fairies and pink cotton candy clouds? Who took the buttons and bows and frilly fancy dresses my babe was to be wearing; that clean sweet baby powdered scent of a baby that I should be inhaling... was it all just an illusion? Would I wake up tomorrow and it would be gone, over... just remnants of a bad dream?
I had been robbed!
Memories of my daughter's birth and the months that followed were surrounded by the sights, sounds and pungent odors of a hospital NICU... the odor of disinfectant and sterility... Sterile equipment, sterile stuffy hospital air, medical staff in their drab sterile scrubs, dim lighting, dark rooms painted such a horrid shade of taupe...seemingly missing all that in my mind was good and pure. Monotonous clicking and beeping of monitors... air hissing from oxygen ports... the screech of a machine as our child would stop breathing...
Worst of all... the sight of my tiny newborn... wrapped in wires and stickers as she lay bare in her little clear box...that damn little box that reminded every second that I could not hold her... tubes in her nose providing the food I so longed to be able to feed her... the endless toe sticks and scraping for precious blood to run yet another test because her veins could not tolerate any more needles... and that God Forsaken tube... the ugly blue and steel tube that now graced my daughters neck instead of a string of pearls or lace collar...
I will never forget the day my husband stood in the hallway ranting to me that he would not allow them to trach her... ever... His hatred for those white coated Doctors ran very deep. Once, as those uniformed bullies surrounded her tiny hospital crib... sticking her over and over trying to start an IV- our daughter cried and violently shook; screaming til no more air could escape her tiny sick lungs. As parents our job is to protect our children from harm... we felt as if we were horrible people, somehow to blame for this nightmare of events... Myself sobbing and wailing loudly... my heart breaking as those emotionless bastards continued to inflict more pain on our baby... Silently Jim stood by my side holding me, then... in the blink of an eye he lost all control. He grabbed a Doc by the collar of his shirt and jacked him up against the wall... lashing out, screaming... equipment now flying around the tiny room. He threatened - "one more stick and I'll stick that needle up all of your asses!" Needless to say... Daddy was escorted out to a private waiting area to cool off. Baby girl was sedated and an IV needle was drilled into her shin bone... Later that night we counted over 97 little scabbed and red pin holes on her tiny 8 pound body.
My Doodle {or Boom as I usually refer to her as} received her trach just one week later... after coding and leaving us 3 times. That tube was frightening. I knew logically that this was the last resort... she needed it to provide the air to her tiny body that she just could not provide for herself.
Yet, the fear and despair of this new chapter in our twisted fairy tale had begun...
Having no idea how this would play out, we had resigned to the fact that "the way it should be- would never be again..." we were now the parents of a trached baby. Oh how I wish that this older version of myself could have somehow squelched all of my fears in those earlier days... the vision for our future was unimaginable... We somehow knew we had been defeated... we had lost the battle for normalcy and that was a very hard pill to swallow.
More of our story will continue next time... please take a moment to follow via GFC to hear more of my random mommy thoughts... the fairy tale does get better!
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