Christmas in the Hospital
Four years ago, we were also in the hospital on Christmas Day. Our older son, born 12 weeks early and not quite 12 weeks old at the time— his due date was December 29 — was four days into a five-day admission with what the doctors ended up determining was RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) although at the time they still weren’t sure. The precise timeline is hazy, but I suppose by the 25th he must have been doing better, because he came home on the 26th, but, gosh, on oxygen, so tiny in that hospital bed, with no one entirely sure what was going on, what the source of his infection was, whether it was bacterial or viral, whether it was spreading or resolving or… we’ve never had a longer five days, and I don’t want to know what a longer five days could feel like.
And there in the hospital, on Christmas Day, a volunteer came around in the pediatric ICU — with Christmas presents for the patients. We didn’t really know what to say. I mean, we wanted to say, “no, we’re Jewish, we don’t celebrate Christmas, we don’t need the gifts, thanks for the gesture, but other people should get these….” I think we may have actually said that, or something like that, but somehow we were made to take the presents anyway, but — and this wasn’t the intention, obviously — as we were handed them, I think it was a stuffed animal and a ball of some sort, it kind of sunk in, maybe for the first time really sunk in, that we had found ourselves in pretty much the saddest situation in the world.
When a stranger has to give you toys— when a stranger is insisting on giving you toys — in a hospital, on a holiday you don’t even celebrate — for your newborn baby who may or may not be effectively recovering from whatever mystery illness he has — it sinks in that it’s not just your own anxiety, your own fears and worries, but it’s real. It’s actual legitimate fear and worry and terror and — sadness, during what is supposed to be a happy, joyous, exciting time.
Is it horrible to admit that we threw out the toys? I mean, we mostly threw them out because they were unwrapped toys that had been in a hospital, and that stuffed animal had who knows what germs embedded within it, and we couldn’t even imagine letting it come home with us — or giving it away to anyone, because if we were afraid of the germs, rightly or wrongly, why would we even think to pass them on to someone else — but I think part of the reason we threw them out is because we never wanted to think about them, we didn’t want to be reminded of when we got them, why we got them, where they came from. We just wanted to move on, to get past it, to live to fight another day.
Fortunately, even though our new baby is in the hospital on Christmas Day this year, things are not quite so dire, at least not today. I mean, I’m not even at the hospital — my immune system has taken a holiday and I’m on day nine of the third cold I’ve had in the six weeks since our son was born, so we’ve pretty much been playing man-to-man defense where I’ve got our 4-year-old (who’s fighting the same cold), my wife is with the baby, and, so far, the incubator has protected him from the germs of the world.
He is doing well. He is 3 pounds, 14 ounces — which means that, by weight, he’s only an ounce or two from being big enough to qualify to come home when the rest of him is ready. By adjusted age, he’s 35 gestational weeks today. Which means he should still be more than a month from birth… but his age also qualifies him to come home when ready. He’s probably in his last 48 hours of incubator life, soon to move to an open crib, because he’s now able to control his temperature. He’s also probably in his last few days of needing oxygen support.
Which means we get to the final phase of NICU life — feeding. He’s being tube-fed now, and soon they’ll decide he’s ready to try a bottle. Once that happens, assuming no other setbacks, his release to home will depend on how quickly he can learn to feed, and hopefully at some point in the middle of January, he’ll be ready. The end of his hospital stay, finally, is in sight. We’re getting his car seat installed this week, to be prepared. We’ll do his laundry. Our 4-year-old made some decorations for his room.
My wife just e-mailed that the hospital just gave us a toy for him, for Christmas. Hopefully, we can find it a good home. But that home won’t be ours. (It’s in a box, so we’ll give it away this time instead of being terrible people who throw out toys, don’t worry.) The only thing I want for this holiday we don’t celebrate is a healthy baby, ready to come home.
