I hear a beep and instantly sit up in a sweat. I lean over in the dark room to touch my daughter’s belly and make sure she’s breathing. Even after confirming she’s fine, it takes me thirty minutes to calm down. And an hour for me to fall back asleep.
When my daughter was in the NICU, there was one night where she threw up. She had a CPAP on, and ended up sucking in her own vomit. It got into her lungs, and she stopped breathing.
Since that moment, I am constantly checking that she’s breathing.
My daughter has been out of the NICU for quite some time. She’s off of oxygen entirely and no longer needs the help of a feeding tube. Her complications? None really. In fact, considering she was born three entire months early, many doctors are amazed by how well she’s doing.
Despite this, despite things going well and her moving past many issues, I cannot let go of the feeling that something bad is going to happen.
Looking back
The NICU had many different beeps, but the main two checked for Brady’s (when a baby’s heart rate goes below 100) and sats, which are the oxygen saturation (when the baby drops below 90).
My daughter was born at 2 pounds and at 27 weeks, so she was a micro preemie. Therefore, she didn’t know how to breathe on her own. She was on a CPAP machine for much of her time before moving to a cannula, which she went home on, and her heart and oxygen was constantly being monitored.
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When she’s with someone else, I ask them to tell me she’s breathing. I wake up ten times a night to check that she’s okay, despite having an owlet monitor.
It’s not that I’m unaware of how far we’ve come. It’s that so much of the NICU is still entrained in me. I spent two months living in the hospital with my daughter. It doesn’t just disappear.
Being a NICU parent is different. You cherish things quite deeply. We’ve cheered on every poop diaper, sleepless night and spit up because we had to deal with her having tubes in her stomach and down her throat. Every milestone met feels like we ran a marathon.
But the bad doesn’t go away either. The fear. I see some parents who are more relaxed with their child and I wish I could be like that. But my daughter has been through so much already, and all I want to do is protect her.
We go without an oxygen monitor now. She goes outside with nothing but her inhaler. She lives a fairly normal life.
And over time, of course, it dulls. The beeps disappear, the hospital room drifts from my mind. But it never truly disappears. The NICU has become a huge part of me, and how I interact with my child, how I see the world, how I protect her.
I know many NICU parents feel similarly. Even parents whose child is years older than mine have mentioned how much it stays with them.
This month is NICU awareness month. The Mott Children’s Hospital NICU saved my daughter’s life. And those first few months, the start of her life, shaped us and her. I’m grateful, and that hospital will always be a part of her story.
