Then my son was born…

He had the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck 3 times. I listened as the doctor actually counted as she unwrapped it 1…2…3… I saw him for a few moments, then they rushed him off to check his vitals and my husband went with him.

I had a scheduled C-section, because my son was breech. After my surgery they wheeled me to a recovery room and my son joined me. He was so tiny, but he felt like mine. He actually did pretty good at his first try breast feeding. My husband never came in the room with my son, I never thought about that before. I will have to ask him where he was, because the next time I saw him, he looked like complete hell. It turns out that my son was not “okay.” He had a low blood-oxygen level and was quickly admitted to the NICU.

We were at Stanford, so a team of doctors, nurses, and medical students ascended on my poor husband and started informing him of some very serious and scary risks to our son. I can’t imagine what that was like for him. All I know is that it was a very good thing that I was on percoset while this was all happening. When my husband began explaining everything to me, I felt so positive and calm. I said, “It is great that our baby is in such good hands. He is going to be fine.” I really believed that.

I wasn’t able to see my son for at least one day, but I think it felt like a lot longer. When I saw him he was connected to all these wires and monitors and he was so tiny- 5 lbs. 6 oz. They gave him medication to clear up an infection, although they didn’t know why he had an infection. He also had difficulty eating- sucking and swallowing. They also found that he had spina bifida occulta. Little did I know at the time that these two issues would be so important as he grew.

My son was in the Intermediate Care Unit for another week before he was finally able to suck and swallow enough to sustain himself. It was such an unbelievable feeling to finally take him home. Being in the NICU and Intermediate Care was one of the most difficult things I ever had to do. My son was the healthiest baby in the NICU, and this will become something I think of often. We were so sad and scared for him, but all around us there were babies that were far more sick than he was and some of those parents would not be leaving with their babies. We were lucky.

He was such a sweet, happy, and affectionate baby. After joining a mother’s group and reading the updates from Babycenter, I could tell that he was a little delayed compared to other children, but I didn’t think it was anything serious and neither did his pediatrician. He had good eye contact with me, he responded to his name, he was a little delayed in speech, but he was making enough progress that we didn’t feel like we had to worry about it. I was a preschool teacher, so I knew there was a very large range of “normal.” He still had eating issues. He could chew his food, but not swallow. I had to puree his food until he was almost 3. It was hard for me because I was a preschool teacher, and if I hadn’t been experiencing it myself, I probably would have thought it was the mother’s fault- “If she didn’t puree his food, he would probably figure it out just fine.” The truth is, if I didn’t puree it he would gag, vomit, or choke, and not eat.

He was in the 5th percentile in weight, so I had to do everything I could to get food into him. I always felt the need to over explain to people what we were doing and why, because I didn’t want people to make the same judgements I probably would have made.

We went to occupational therapy, where they told us that everything we were doing was right on. So I had to hold on to that as I got unsolicited advice from family and friends like “Just put food on his plate, he won’t starve himself and he will have to figure out the eating.” Maybe that is advice I would have given someone as well. But it is bad advice and the OT told us that many children she saw had parents that did that very thing, and those children were in poor health, afraid of food, and had negative behavior issues because of it.

You never know what it is like to walk in someone else’s shoes.

I feel like I will be saying that a lot as I write this, because you really never know what you are going to get or where you will go, or what you will do, or who your children will be. You just don’t know and you really have to try to hold your judgements until you have been there yourself. This is our story.