Prematurity Strikes Again

Denton's Band

Before we had Taylor and Alivya I was blissfully ignorant about pregnancy.  All the babies that I had known personally were born fat and healthy, spent a couple days with their mommies in the hospital then went home to thrive and grow and change the world. Even after spending a day of my maternal health clinical as a rotation in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, I didn't appreciate all that it said.  Those babies were the unlucky few, the minority.  A few hours in the NICU doesn't allow anyone to truly appreciate the branding it does to the babies, their parents and extended families.  You don't understand the suffering, or the pure shame and guilt that a mother feels when her first act as a parent, life itself, seems a failure.

Now that we have journeyed through the NICU ourselves twice, and travel in circles where countless others have journeyed through, I am surprised at how profoundly it continues to affect me when it strikes close again.  Tonight I received a text from a very close friend which new that her water had broken and she delivered her baby boy.  He was due sometime in the early summer and therefore would not be viable now.  The tears streamed down my checks and I relived all the moments in last four years that have terrified me.  All the moments when I didn't know what the very near future held for my babies.  The day my water broke at 20weeks, the doctor insisting that we deliver to "get it over with", my incredibly naive stubbornness.   Then when all those emotions have sucked out all that I had in me, then I feel guilt.  I feel guilty about why mine survived and others didn't.  I get upset with medicine's fallibility. Why couldn't they save those babies?  Then I feel humbled.  I'm reminded about the gift that my children really are like a slap in the face reminds you to pay attention.  These are the moments when I realize just how fine that edge was that we walked and how easy it would have been for things to go another direction.

And even though I don't have millions or thousands of dollars, I have won the lottery... four times.