I still couldn't move my legs. The epidural they'd given me to perform a manual placenta removal because my body wasn't ready to deliver it would prevent me getting up for hours yet. But as I lay there in the half-light of a private ward, listening to healthy newborns crying across the corridor, my mind raced: if only I'd known. If only my body and mind had been prepared.
But you can't prepare for prematurity, I realise now.
Many mothers know they are at risk of premature delivery. Many are forced to spend days, weeks or months trying to carry a baby determined to enter the world before it should for as long as possible, to maximise their chances of surviving and thriving. I wasn't one of them. I was one of the lucky ones.
I was at work, 29 weeks pregnant and thinking about how far away the start of maternity leave felt. Thirty minutes later, I was in an ambulance being taken to a hospital I had never set foot in before to give birth to my second child.
That night, as I lay there trying to remember the face of a little boy I'd only glimpsed before they whisked him into the incubator, I felt I had to play catch up. I knew nothing about prematurity. Nothing. I frantically Googled “prematurity” and all its synonyms. As the hours passed, my search terms became more desperate: “prematurity”+“breastfeeding” soon became “pre-term birth”+“29 weeks”+”survival chances”. If only I had been prepared for this. If only I’d known it was coming, I kept thinking.
It wouldn't have made a difference, of course. You can find out a lot about prematurity very quickly these days - you can join forums, you can read blogs, you can even read research papers by neonatologists on your mobile phone. But nothing can prepare you for the reality. For the unnaturalness of being separated from your child minutes after birth. For being able to see through your baby's skin to the veins pulsing underneath. Nothing can ready you for having to touch your baby through holes in a plastic box strewn with long lines and wires amid the incessant beeping of alarms and monitors, as if you were disposing of the most beautiful bomb in history. Nothing can prepare you for that awful smell of sterility or the suffocating fear that your child might die.
Nothing can prepare you for an NICU stay (or even having to learn, quickly, what this, along with a host of other acronyms, means), where time ebbs and flows in a uniquely excruciating manner. Or for the waves of despair and hope we rode as we waited many weeks for our baby to come home.
And nothing can prepare anyone for the impossible logistics of special care life. For having to choose between your children because a neonatal unit doesn't have family-friendly visiting policies. For your partner having to go to work while your life is in tatters because they need to save up their precious paternity leave in case you get home. For the significant sums of money you have to find for petrol, parking and food to be near your child. And when your child, like our little boy, will live with the effects of prematurity forever, nothing can prepare you for your new normal afterwards.
No: you can't prepare for the unimaginable.
But others can support you and make the impossible bearable. Doctors and nurses can remember that their patient is your child. They can remember that the acronyms they use - IVH, PDA, CLD, PDA, NEC - might mean nothing to you, and that, when you do know what they mean, they can shatter your world. Units can help by remembering that you are a family and providing a literal and metaphorical space for you to be that: to express milk for them and to read stories to your child with their siblings present, for example. They can provide rooms where you and your family can stay for a night or two so that you are in the same building (or in my case, county) as your baby.
Friends and family can babysit siblings or send food (you don't eat well in the NICU, I can tell you). They can send cards or gifts. After experiencing the pain of premature birth, the hardest thing I faced was many friends and family members not saying congratulations or sending cards because they thought our boy might die. Not knowing what to say, they said nothing. I understood. But it hurt.
And all of us can donate time or money to charities like Bliss, which does so much to raise awareness of prematurity, by offering training to healthcare professionals and providing vital information and emotional support to many of the 60,000 families affected by pre-term labour every year in the UK.
I was not prepared for prematurity when it abruptly entered our lives over 2 years ago. But with the care and support of many, we made it home. Prematurity still marks our lives with its legacy of cerebral palsy for our little man. But make no mistake: we are lucky.
Because just as nothing can prepare you for prematurity, nor can anything prepare you for the intense joy and gratitude when your baby comes home. And our little boy continues to amaze us and his medical team daily by growing into a bright, happy and utterly gorgeous individual with the best laugh you have ever heard.
Guest posts
Guest post: 'Nothing can prepare you for the realities of prematurity'
MumsnetGuestPosts · 17/11/2014 10:54
Ooh, Mrbooandsissyboosmum, I often read your blog!! I was a bit disappointed to find mumsnet distinctly lacking in World Prematurity Day content today, but this has more than made up for it 
My son was born at 29 weeks last year. The whole package of preterm birth, NICU stay and return home was by far the most terrifying and stressful experience of my life (made worse by total social isolation at the time). We were very lucky in that he avoided any serious complications and has been in good health since, but I still find myself extraordinarily drained, both emotionally and physically speaking. It's often a bit hard to share with 'non-prem' parents, who often assume that we've 'put it behind us' by now. I also find that people often don't want to hear about his birth or NICU stay, while I still often want to talk about it. So thanks again for writing this - it's really helpful to share experiences.
Another 29-weeker here. I had no idea what was happening to me: I'd had a water infection for a few week, had finally finished work and the following Sunday she was born, weighing just over 2lb. My first memory is of waking up after the emergency cs wearing very little but something rather bloody stuffed between my legs. It was so sudden I didn't even have a spare pair of undercrackers
.
I didn't get to see her for a while because I was still attached to various bits of equipment, but the hospital very thoughtfully gave me a private room so that I couldn't hear other babies crying. All ended well, thankfully, and dd has developed into a bright, relentlessly active and rather grungy-looking pre-teen.
Like others on here, I still can't hear one of those bloody SAT machines without my heart skipping a beat.
I feel so incredibly lucky. It could have been so different. And no, I do not "grieve over" the missed opportunity to give birth "properly" as some seem to do.
No, I didn't get to have skin to skin contact after birth
No, I didn't have DS in a cot beside me in the loud, filled with screaming babies postnatal ward
No, I didn't bond with DS immediately - I wasn't really ready to call anyone "my son"
Yes, I do think I should have taken things easier when I was pregnant
Yes, I donate to Tommy's because I'm very aware how lucky we are that DS is genuinely fine
Thanks for all the questions everyone over the last 8 years - thanks for the blog Mrboosmum
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