Episode 1: NICU Admittance and Overview

My sweet baby boy was brought into the world in a very chaotic way. At 33 weeks pregnant I was put on light bedrest and at 34 weeks pregnant I was admitted into the hospital for pre-eclampsia. At 35 weeks pregnant my teeny tiny preemie was welcomed via a crazy emergency c-section and immediately whisked away to the NICU. Hudson came out a whopping 4lbs and 5oz which was considered small for his gestational age and had an extremely low blood sugar.

The entire birth experience was traumatizing and I remember almost none of it and remember absolutely nothing in between getting closed up and trying to climb out of the hospital bed and into the wheelchair to go the NICU several hours later.

Austin had spent a ton of time with Hudson already and was briefed with all the information regarding his health. I, however, just got sliced open and stapled back up and had no clue what was going on. My first memory post c-section is a nurse and Austin helping me out of the bed into the wheelchair to go to the NICU. I don’t recall anyone even telling me he was there or what the issue was. I was briefed ahead of the c-section that there was a very high chance he would go there, simply because he was still under 5lbs on my last ultrasound, but I was unaware of any additional complications. It was a very hard wake up to see my teeny tiny 4lb baby hooked up to a million wires and a feeding tube shoved up his nose and down his throat. I remember being wheeled into his bay and just loosing it while the nurse tried to tell me what was going on.

Hudson was considered very small for his gestational age, had an extremely low blood sugar, slight jaundice, and wouldn’t feed. This meant feeding tube, IV (which later became a PICC line), UV lights, and constant lab work. Truly, I cannot recall what issue happened but by day 2 a heart echo was ordered and that caused some serious panic. Thankfully that came back all clear but the rest was still a problem.

We spent 2 weeks in this NICU working on getting him bigger, eating more, and maintaining his blood sugar. He was on a constant IV of Dextrose and they put in a PICC Line as a better solution than the IV. Every three hours we would wake him up, change his diaper, check his blood sugar, and feed him. Every three hours this teeny tiny baby would get his heel poked with a needle in order to make him bleed so they could check his sugar level. Every. Three. Hours. For. 21. Days. This mamas heart breaks just thinking about it.

By the end of week 2 he was off the feeding tube and taking bottles like a champ but was not making much progress on the blood sugar. The doctors available at this NICU were unable to come up with any other solutions and wanted him to be seen by a specialist- which meant we had to be transferred to a higher level NICU facility. Thankfully we have one in town but it was now a 45 minute drive from our house as opposed to a 15 minute drive. The day of his transfer he was placed into what I can only describe as an incubator on wheels and rolled away into an ambulance. I had to sign waiver after waiver acknowledging the risks involved with placing this tiny little boy in a speeding ambulance and then told I couldn’t even ride with him. On top of that, they told me I had to wait an hour after his expected arrival time before I would even be able to check in to go see him. By the time I got to my car the ambulance was gone and I was not able to find them to follow them there to at least know when he got there.

When I was finally allowed into the new NICU I was completely overwhelmed. We went from a NICU with less than 15 bays to a NICU with hundreds of them. They were split into two wings - A side for extremely high risk and B side for not as high risk. Guess which side I got sent to. You got it! A side - because my nerves were not all ready wrecked enough! Because he was a transfer patient they made me and any nurse that went in his bay wear these itchy yellow gowns over our clothes while they waited for some tests to come back to make sure he didn’t have cooties or something like that! If you are following along with my entire chaotic year this is the point in the story where I got my cancer diagnosis and then went back into the new scary NICU to continue this part of the journey.

One week later, and with the specialists doing absolutely nothing different than the original NICU doctors (yes, I am bitter about this), we were finally free to go home! Don’t worry my luck isn’t that good. It’s 6 months later and I just talked to four different specialist doctors two days ago to try and figure out a problem he is having. Do preemie problems ever end?