Month: October 2014

Do you remember the show Rescue 911?

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Windy and Rachel on their last night shift with London before she leaves the NICU.

When I was much younger I watched the show Rescue 911. Hosted by William Shatner, the show reenacted real-life emergencies and spliced in interviews from people who were present when the aforementioned emergencies occurred. At the end of the reenactments, the rescuers who saved the individual/s in need of help, were reunited with the people they saved.

The reenactments are so bad they are painful to watch. It was easy to find some old episodes of the show on YouTube. There is even a story about a baby being born “nearly three months early” while on a flight. He weighed in at 4 lbs, 6 oz. (I have to interject here, if the baby was really almost three months early, that’s a huge kid for that gestational age). Here’s the link to the story about the premature birth on the flight. As you might guess, the reenactment is hilariously bad.

What got me thinking about Rescue 911 was seeing some of London’s nurses the other week. I got home and two of her primaries were visiting Kate and London, eating pizza Kate made, and sipping wine. I got a chance to visit with the nurses a little bit before they left and during that time I thought of the reunions at the end of Rescue 911. I always enjoyed these scenes, loving the idea of being able to see and possibly become friends with the people responsible for saving my life or, in this case, my daughter’s life. And now, that was happening right there in my kitchen.

I would never wish what Kate and I went through with London upon anyone. But if it is to happen, this is the happiest ending one could possibly hope for. We were incredibly blessed to have such caring NICU nurses. And now those nurses have become friends. I hope that as long as we are in Denver and as long as they are working nearby, the reunions continue because, for us, they are heroines.

PTSD from the NICU

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Another day down, but one last peek at London before we leave for the night.

When someone first suggested that I am suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) I stifled my disagreement and listened, doubtfully, to their explanation. A few minutes later, when they were done speaking, I was nearly in agreement with them.

Prior to this conversation, having PTSD was not something I thought I could get. Naively, I associated PTSD with war veterans and not many other people. But this is so wrong. The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) defines PTSD this way:

When in danger, it’s natural to feel afraid. This fear triggers many split-second changes in the body to prepare to defend against the danger or to avoid it. This “fight-or-flight” response is a healthy reaction meant to protect a person from harm. But in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), this reaction is changed or damaged. People who have PTSD may feel stressed or frightened even when they’re no longer in danger.

PTSD develops after a terrifying ordeal that involved physical harm or the threat of physical harm. The person who develops PTSD may have been the one who was harmed, the harm may have happened to a loved one, or the person may have witnessed a harmful event that happened to loved ones or strangers.

Kate and I were afraid for months while London was in the NICU. We did not always realize it, but we were preparing ourselves for the worst outcomes in the NICU in an attempt to defend against them. Now that London is out, far removed from those most terrifying days, we still occasionally feel frightened and on edge. I first noticed a change when I was performing simple tasks, like preparing some milk for London. On a few occasions I spilled some of that milk and instantly my temper flared. And if anyone was around, I was mean to them. When I am like this I do not want to be near anyone. I was not crying over spilled milk. I was inconsolable over spilled milk. I was not sad. I was irate that something did not go my way. Everything sucked. I consider myself to be a patient person, so this new feeling of anger over something so unimportant was troubling. In fact, that realization made everything worse, bringing a snowball effect to my PTSD.

In addition to losing my temper, I can be anywhere doing anything and if I slip up and think about the scariest moments in the NICU or in the OR the night of London’s birth I am fighting back tears. These are not voluntary recalls. I do not want to think about the scary moments, but the trauma of London’s start is prolonged and fresh in my mind. To think back is to invite some of those moments into the present and once you do that it is hard to stop the flow.

The NIMH definition of PTSD continues:

PTSD was first brought to public attention in relation to war veterans, but it can result from a variety of traumatic incidents, such as mugging, rape, torture, being kidnapped or held captive, child abuse, car accidents, train wrecks, plane crashes, bombings, or natural disasters such as floods or earthquakes.

Or as someone recently put it, “You were not just in a single life-threatening accident with London. You were in one week after week after week and the person most precious to you in this world was the one always at the greatest risk.”

Truer words have not been shared with me. Having a baby at 26 weeks is exactly like that. Every time we drove to the hospital we braced ourselves for the accident. For a while, we got bad news every day. Sometimes it was just a trickle. And on the worst days it was a flood.

Even when the bad news did not come, we still braced for it. Do that day after day for 109 days and PTSD becomes a near certainty. For almost four months Kate and I did not just daydream about worst-case scenarios. On top of the worries every parent has concerning their newborn baby, we had to have real, hard discussions about our variety of worries stemming solely from London’s delicate start to life. At the end of most of these discussions one or both of us were crying and holding onto each other.

Until your child comes home from the NICU you live at a heightened state of anxiety. It becomes your new normal and when you plateau for that long coming down can do some really weird things to you. We are still adjusting.

The Fastest Year of My Life

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Taking in the sunrise from our room in Mexico.

Last year, Kate and I were in Playa del Carmen for a wedding during the first weekend in November. I was thinking of this trip just last week and I momentarily refused to believe it had almost been a year since Kate and I strolled along on the beach during a midday thunderstorm. That walk and the rest of that trip are so vivid and crisp in my mind, we could have been there last month. How could those memories be a year old?

Less than two weeks after we returned from Mexico we went under contract on our first home. The next 12 days I was busy with the purchase of the home and making sure we could move out of our apartment before the lease ended. Then we were off to Wyoming for Thanksgiving. Then we drove back. A few days later we flew to Orlando for a week. Then it was a week of last minute Christmas gatherings and preparations before we traveled to New Mexico. There for nearly a week, we drove back and closed on our house that Monday, December 30th. I started painting throughout the house that afternoon. We moved furniture on January 7th. The house was a mess and there was still more painting left to do. We then had a relatively calm three weeks (as calm and restful as settling into your first house can be).

Then the night of January 29th arrived and Kate had painful contractions at 26 weeks. The next significant date in my head is May 19th, the day London came home. And then a summer spent on edge as London slowly strengthened and we traveled to weddings. And then fall arrived. And now we’re almost back where we started.

From January 29th to May 19th, it did not matter what day of the week it was. It did not matter the month, the holiday, the weather, the time. It only mattered that London was doing okay and getting better. These days are curiously recalled in my mind. There is so much held within the borders of them that it will take years to process just how much we changed during that time and how it affected us. Yet, at times, those days seem like one really long fast day. And then it was summer and our girl was home. I recall pausing during my walk out of the hospital one day in April to take in the weather. “My God, it’s spring,” I mumbled to myself. Where had winter gone? I was actually dumbfounded. I can easily remember the cold night we arrived. That was the last day I cared about the weather.

Living on edge makes life go by very quickly. That is one thing I have learned in the last year.

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May 23, 2014. 4th day home.

London is home now. She is strong and happy beyond our wildest hopes and expectations. I do not call her a miracle baby because I never want “miracle” to be a term I casually use. But it is true. She is a miracle. And she is not the only miracle of the last year. It is a miracle all three of us made it through. At times it did not seem possible. It did not seem possible that time would slow. But it did. And I care about the weather once more.

If You’re Just Now Getting Here

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I probably should have done this sooner, but if you’re just now finding this blog via a tweet, Facebook share, or web search, then you should know that it all started with a series of posts detailing London’s birth. These posts are the foundation of this blog and, for their author, the hardest to write and the hardest to reread.

Feel free to scroll down through the archives, but if you’re looking for square one, and for getting a better feeling of how this family got its start, follow the links below. A quick word about the original posts, there are thirteen of them, but they aren’t very long posts so reading all parts is not a big ask.

London’s Birth Part I. 

Part II.

Part III.

Part IV.

Part V.

Part VI.

Part VII.

Part VIII. 

Part IX.

Part X.

Part XI.

Part XII.

Part XIII.

The NICU Is A Fortress

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One of my favorites. Her 2-month birthday. “To infinity and beyond.”

As badly as I wanted London to leave the NICU I was also terrified of some of the things she would lose when we walked out of that hospital. 24/7 caretakers. A team of RNs, NPs, and MDs just feet away. The opportunity to talk to one of them whenever we wanted to and to ask the dumbest questions of.

As a parent, you do grow accustomed to having your baby in the hospital 24/7. It is comforting to know that your child has the best babysitters in the world.

While London was still in the hospital I wrote:

Right now I feel like taking her home will be bittersweet. I’ll be beside myself, in a good way, when we walk into our house holding London, but it’ll also be frightening to leave our NICU family.

Back then, the approaching discharge date meant exposing an already fragile baby to the terrors of this world like driving home with her! Or contact with the public, those creepy baby oglers who think they have the right to walk up and touch your child just because she is the cutest thing they have ever seen. Can’t stand these people! We would be responsible for a baby, yes, but also all the leashes that come with her: NG tube connected to a feeding pump, an oxygen cord, and a pulse ox connected to her foot. Monitoring all that could be overwhelming on top of normal baby duties.

But a baby has to leave the NICU eventually. We had our gambles and triumphs there in that pod, but the good stuff was to be found in life beyond those hospital walls. It is hard to think of leaving the NICU as anything but a tradeoff. An adventure was before us, filled with successes and failures, loss and gain, losses and victories. But behind us was London’s NICU pod, which, for her parents, became the safest place in the world.

Why London?

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“So, I have to ask. Why the name London?”

This is a question we get a lot. I have always loved London’s name, but it took some time to figure out exactly why. The short answer we give goes something like this: “We both really love the name because it’s gender neutral. London, the city, holds a special place in our hearts and a couple years ago we first BKP_7211thought of naming one of our kids London.”

But the long answer, if you are willing to bear with me, is this:

London, the city in the United Kingdom, yeah, that London, is one of the sacred places in my life, which may sound ridiculous to you when I tell you I have only been there twice. However, as is sometimes the case, it is not really how many times we go to a certain city or country that matters, but what time in our life did we go to a certain city or country. For me, the time that mattered was when I was 22 years of age, in my last semester of undergraduate studies, during which I studied in London. This was my fifth year of college, but as I was an NCAA athlete for the first four years, studying abroad was not an option for a while.

When I arrived in London I was very young, educated (somewhat), and ignorant about quite a few things in this world. I wouldn’t say I was sheltered, but I was thirsty for knowledge and new experiences. I was ready for an adventure, malleable in a way, and ready to have some ideas and beliefs challenged during my time there.

I could not have arrived in London with a better mindset. I accepted an internship at a small publishing house on London’s south side. I preferred to traverse the city on foot when I could. I paid as little attention to my studies as I could and as much attention to the fast, diverse city whirling around me. I often explored alone, my classmates more interested in frequenting a neighborhood pub. I went to pubs too, but chose to go after work with my British co-workers. On one of these occasions, I turned 23 and celebrated the evening with my cool, new, and temporary officemates. The BKP_7344month after that Kate spent her spring break in London with me. She fell in love too, and I fell more in love with her as we explored London and a little of Paris, savoring the moments that I knew we would never be able to replicate because we were young, free, and unfettered from worries and responsibilities we had back home, across an ocean.

Four months of London and getaways to Scotland, Cambridge, Bath, Dover, Salisbury, Paris, and Israel behind me, I was facing a return trip back to Colorado. London had certainly challenged me. I had dramatically changed, but I did not know for years how much this time molded my thinking.

Kate and I went back there in 2012. We were in a position to go almost anywhere in the world, but the thought of reliving our London experience (this time with money!) tugged on our hearts with such strength that I quickly narrowed down the list of possible countries to visit, all of which were conveniently a little skip away from London. 2012 was another adventure in London, which, for the most part, hadn’t changed much in six years. But we had.

And we’ve changed a lot since. Big new job for Kate. I finished grad school. We bought a house. And our first child was on the way. We did not just name her after a city, but after an adventure, the most cherished one to date, knowing she would supplant it as soon as she arrived. She has, with a vengeance.

8 Memories for 8 Months

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I had wanted to sit down and write this on London’s actual 8 month birthday, but I’ve been very busy this last week and a half painting a bathroom on the main level of my house. This was no ordinary paint job either. The primary color, Loyal Blue, from Sherwin-Williams had a really hard time covering the tannish color of the bathroom. Four coats. I painted four bathrooms, they just all happened to be the same one. One wall is striped with SW’s Citrus color and their high hide white. Now that that’s done I can once again return to writing a little more regularly, but now I throw in some obligatory before and after shots of my handiwork.

Before:

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Pictured: the bathroom on our main floor before I spent a week in it.

After:

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Boom. Nautica, if you find this blog, I just wanted to let you know that it does look like I copied the color scheme of every piece of clothing you have ever made, but it was just coincidence. Promise.

Onward.

As I think of each month of London’s life so far they are all so distinct in my mind. Naturally, there are some moments that always come to the forefront, like London’s extubation in month 1 or her discharge day in month 4. But for this post I wanted to write about the less obvious memories from each one of these awesome months. Here goes…

Month 1

Crazy. Crazy is knowing you’re about to introduce someone to their first grandchild. As my father-in-law followed me into the NICU on the day of London’s birth, he could not exactly see where I was leading him. As I arrived at London’s isolette I stepped to the side and Tim got his first glance of my daughter, his granddaughter. I put a hand on his shoulder and the first words out of his mouth were, “She’s perfect.”

I don’t know what I expected to hear from him. It’s one thing introducing a full-term baby to someone, it’s another thing altogether to present to someone their granddaughter weighing in at 2 lbs, skin and bone skinny, draped with wires and tubes, and plugged into intimidating machine after machine. To hear someone say, “She’s perfect,” after seeing all that was exactly what I needed to hear at that moment. Tim probably didn’t intend to make such an impact with those words, but had he thought about them in advance he couldn’t have come up with something better.

Month 2

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This month we started to dress London in clothes. Her skin was tougher. She wasn’t vented anymore. It was still one hell of a task to put an outfit on her, but I discovered I loved dressing her. Still do. This was the first time I remember her being in an outfit. The picture doesn’t do this outfit justice. As you can see her outfit appears baggy, but if I go into her closet right now and find this in the pile of preemie clothing we have I will be astonished at its size. It’s hard to believe she was small enough to ever fit it. London has an incredible wardrobe. Every day I get a little excited about choosing her outfit for the morning. Of course, I have to yield to mom’s choice some days.

BONUS Month 2 Memory: Like every other day, I was sitting there with London, doing kangaroo care in the recliner that every NICU pod has, but today the recliner was reclined more than usual. I carefully tried to adjust the incline of the seat without disrupting London’s sleep or pinching the tube on her CPAP, but nothing was working. The seat just kept reclining and reclining to the point that if I didn’t extend my right arm to firmly grasp the end of the armrest, the chair was going to tip backward. So there I sat for 40 minutes or so. Right arm keeping both London and I from falling backwards. Left arm holding her steady on my chest. Body rigid so as not to disrupt our balance. Silent. Just waiting for Megan to come check on us so she can help us out of this broken seat.

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My dad holding London for the first time on April 3. This was also when my mom first held London. London’s fingers were still the size of the finger nail on my dad’s index finger. When you have a preemie, one big adjustment you have to make right away is not getting to hold your baby for a while. Grandparents had to wait much longer. Friends had to wait until London was out of the hospital. A lot of what people associate with having a baby is greatly delayed. As a NICU parent, you quickly grow accustomed to all big events arriving at a snail’s pace.

Month 4

Kate’s dad and sister were in town one weekend. It was a Sunday and they were headed back to Wyoming. They had gone ahead with Kate to the hospital. I stayed behind, taking care of some things at the house and would possibly join them later. As I was walking up to the front doors of the hospital I saw Tim and Kendra. We had a brief conversation and said goodbye, but I knew something was not right. I got upstairs to London’s pod and could see it in Kate’s eyes. I sat down next to my two girls and waited for our primary nurse, Megan, to come in and explain to us the next NICU obstacle.

What stands out about this day is instantly knowing from my conversation with Tim and Kendra that I was about to get disappointing news and that when I heard that news from Megan, it was the first time I cried in front of her. The curtain was open, I’m sitting there with my back to the window, facing out into the rest of the NICU and wondering after all this time if we were ever going to get out of this place with a healthy, strong daughter.

Month 5

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This was the first full month that London was at home with us. To narrow all the memories down to one particular moment does not mean that the selected moment is better than all the rest that month. I’m just going to go with mornings for Month 5. It was still early summer, so the cool morning air coming in the windows made it especially hard to wake up after also waking once or twice during the night to feed London. This was one of those days when Kate took care of the early morning feeding and I, still holding onto the belief that if I kept on sleeping I would eventually catch up to the lack of sleep over the last five months, kept on sleeping (as you can see). But there’s no catching up. Look at London’s face. She knows it. She thinks it’s funny.

Month 6

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Going out on the Flaming Gorge Reservoir. It’s something that we do every summer, but this particular day, was the first time we left London with anyone for more than an hour. Kate’s mom watched her and we went out for some tubing and fishing. We had to let go for a few hours. Letting go after such a long and traumatic NICU stay is, without a doubt, one of the hardest things for NICU parents to do.

Month 7

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That time she fell asleep while doing the “pull-my-finger” joke on herself.

Month 8

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Establishing traditions. We met my parents in Breckenridge two weeks ago. Breck is a Colorado mountain town Kate and I love to visit. This was London’s second trip to Breck, but this time it was more relaxed and she was much stronger. Some traditions you welcome new family members into and other traditions are established once that new family member arrives. This was the former, but I know that this tradition will look much different in the future as London grows up and wants to do more and more activities. We’ll have her biking up Swan Mountain Road in no time.

 

Sharing Someone Else’s Writing

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Hey there, long time, no blog. My apologies. I’ve had a busy week and there’s only so much one can do when one’s baby is napping. If I don’t get to writing during that time, then it was spent cleaning, eating lunch, reading in the backyard, etc.

This week I noticed an article one of my friends had shared on Facebook. The headline, “If I Have Gay Children: Four Promises From A Christian Pastor/Parent,” caught my eye. I followed the link and read with interest the aforementioned “Four Promises.” Right from the start, I appreciated the author’s honesty when he opened with, “Sometimes I wonder if I’ll have gay children.” I have certainly thought about this as well. I am sure most have, if not for a fleeting moment than long enough to dwell on it and write a blog post about it and share it with the world. Obviously, the author has done the latter and it has garnered thousands of comments (critical and praiseworthy) and a story about the blog post on CNN.

I found myself in complete agreement with the father’s promises so I thought I would share the post here.