I didn’t feel like we should be celebrating
Sarah Murray recalls the guilt and fear she felt after her daughter Sloane was born seven weeks early.
Icouldn’t sleep that first night. Not being able to move from the waist down made my mind go into overdrive. The constant beeping of machines, and squeaking of the nurse’s shoes onto the lino only heightened my awareness of all the newborn babies mewing on the maternity ward – and the absence of mine.
Only hours earlier, at 33 weeks pregnant, my daughter had been pulled prematurely from my stomach. ‘‘We’ve got to get her out,’’ the obstetrician matter-of-factly said when a monitor showed her heart rate was going incredibly fast, and then excruciatingly slow.
It was too early. She wasn’t ready, and neither was I. Our daughter became one of the 7.4 per cent of babies born prematurely in New Zealand in 2018.
I’d arrived at the hospital, driven by my mum, with a small bleed. There was no hospital bag filled with maternity bras and pre-washed baby clothes – just me, my handbag and my laptop. I wasn’t expecting to stay. It turned out I had what they frustratingly called an ‘‘unexplained infection’’ and nobody knew why, but the next day the obstetrician said when he put his hands inside of me to pull her out, it was like a hot bath (when it should have been cool).
Giving birth to a premature baby is filled with confusing and often contradictory emotions. I was shocked, grateful, devastated, elated, worried, hopeful and so sad – often all at the same time. I walked around trying not to burst into tears. It felt incredibly overwhelming. More than anything though, I felt guilty.
I kept going over the days leading up to the emergency C-section. Was it something I ate, was I too stressed? Did I not look after myself enough? Did I miss something? My sole job in the last seven months was to grow and protect this baby inside of me, and I felt like I’d failed. Like I’d failed her.
Flowers, lactations cookies, meals, and offers to babysit our just-turned 2-year-old son came in thick and fast. We were fortunate to be surrounded and supported by so many people but I felt like a fraud, like I didn’t deserve the pink-themed cards and the congratulatory messages.
And honestly, it didn’t feel like we should be celebrating. We were reeling. It was three days before I was allowed to hold her, and when I did she didn’t smell like a new baby, but like hospital. Clean and sterile. She was in an incubator in North Shore Hospital’s Specialist Care Baby Unit with a mask covering her face to help her breathe and a feeding tube taped to her mouth.
Tiny wires were attached to her tiny hands and feet; more stuck to her chest. I felt like those wires were attached to me because every time the alarms went off or spiked like mountain peaks on the monitor, I’d jump. I had to relinquish all control to the nurses and it was them who had to untangle her to let me, her mother, hold her.
And even though I was in a noisy bustling room filled with other mums and babies in a similar shocked situation, as well as experienced nurses, doctors and lactation specialists, I felt isolated and alone. I spent my days sitting in a turquoise armchair, expressing milk, watching the heart and oxygen monitors and staring at my daughter through a plastic box.
I felt completely disconnected both to her and the outside world. For a while, it seemed to only get harder. On the fourth day I was sent home, alone, without her. I kept wondering what the neighbours must be thinking since I’d left a few days earlier with a proud and pronounced bump, and returned with a tummy that resembled a half deflated balloon and no baby in sight.
After getting over the initial shock of having a premature baby, the difficulties of the logistical issues came next. I couldn’t drive so I had to taxi to the hospital every morning – an hour round trip from West Auckland to the North Shore. I’d wake exhausted from expressing every three hours overnight and would walk in, chiller bag in hand filled with the night before’s haul of liquid gold.
I’d be anxious and fidgety, always checking to make sure my daughter was alive and breathing and the machines were all still working before putting my milk away in the fridge. Fortunately, the nurses were empathetic and bright and caring – they made everything look so effortless and I began to relax a little.
My husband came back to the hospital with me every evening (after we’d had dinner with our son) and the nurses showed us how to take her temperature every feed, how to measure out her feed and give it to her through a nasogastric tube, and how to tuck the wires of the monitor into her nappy strap so they didn’t get tangled.
They taught us how to give her a daily dose of liquid iron and vitamin C which left brown and yellow stains on every chunky knitted woollen vest they advised she wear, and opened up their cupboard full of the teeniest tiniest baby clothes which they let us borrow.
‘‘When can we take her home?’’ I asked after a week. ‘‘Just aim for your due date and we’ll go from there,’’ a nurse said. A line I’m sure she repeated continuously.
For us, that meant seven weeks. Outside the specialist unit I felt a pang of envy when I saw newborns being walked around the maternity ward with their mums or when dads came in with empty capsules and left with their baby in it. I desperately tried to get her to feed from me – knowing it was the key to getting home but like most premature babies she had trouble sucking and swallowing.
I spent hours expressing, expressing, expressing with a hospital-issue double pump and watching the clock, willing her to feed longer than two