What NICU means to so many moms.

As many soon-to-be moms do, I had a birth plan. It included a vaginal birth with no epidural, no unnecessary medications, a minimum of 1 hour of initial skin to skin contact bonding time, delayed cord clamping and of course my baby would latch on right away with no problems. Well, I quickly found out that your plan can easily go right out of the window.

At 35 weeks 5 days pregnant, I was at a weekly doctor visit. My pregnancy was considered high risk due to my age (sad that 35 is considered “Advanced Maternal Age”) and a fibroid that grew along with my pregnancy. While on the non-stress monitor, a deceleration of my baby’s heart was detected. I will never forget the nurse’s voice yelling into the hallway, “I need a doctor in here now”. Thankfully the baby’s heart came back up but I was immediately admitted to the hospital and induced using a cervical balloon. Ok I thought, not quite the date I was thinking I would be giving birth, but at least I was being induced without medicine so I was still staying on track with my plan.

For a couple of hours, things seemed to move smoothly. I was not only being dilated by the cervical balloon, but the manual dilation had actually triggered labor to begin so I was now having contractions on my own as well. Then all of a sudden, the baby’s heart decelerated again. Thankfully, because of the situation, I had 2 nurses in the Labor and Delivery unit stationed just to me. They ran in and flipped me from side to side, trying to get the baby’s heart back up on the monitor. The baby’s heart once again resumed normal rhythm so we continued on as planned. Then it happened again…and again. The crazy thing was that when the baby’s heart was not decelerating, it was picture perfect on the monitor – there was approximately an hour in between each deceleration period. If we weren’t catching it on the monitor at the exact moment, we’d never have known.

My OBGYN wanted to be 100% sure of what was going on with the baby so she decided to attach electrodes to the baby’s head. By now I was up to 6cm dilated and had handled the labor pretty well, but having my OB go up inside of my uterus to attach something to the baby was not something I wanted to feel – enter epidural.

I can honestly say that although I was a little upset with myself for deviating from my plan, watching a contraction happen on the screen and not feeling anything other than a little pressure in my abdomen was quite nice. But things quickly turned more serious. The baby had back to back deceleration periods within 10 minutes of each other and my blood pressure was now dropping as well. Then the baby’s heart was not being detected at all and my OB said “We need to section you now”. I was rushed, literally had a team of doctors and nurses run my stretcher, to the operating room. Getting the epidural was now a blessing in disguise – there would have been no time to administer one and had it not already been in place, I would have been placed under full sedation. Thankfully, I was able to remain awake for the birth and could have my husband right at my head with me.

My baby, whom I now found out was a girl, was not breathing when she was born; her apgar was 2. The team of Neonatologists worked tirelessly on her with an oxygen mask and at 4 minutes old, she took her first breath. She was not out of the woods by far yet though. She had blood in her lungs and her oxygen sats kept dropping to the point of her needing to be intubated. She spent the next 24 days in the NICU and my only saving grace of everything she went though is that although I will never forget, she won’t remember a thing.

My husband and I are so grateful for the team of doctors and nurses that saved our daughter’s life that we wanted to give back to the hospital in some way. We aren’t in much of a position to donate financially but I reached out to the hospital and asked to be put on any mailing lists for fundraisers or events for the NICU. The Director of Philanthropy contacted me himself after that and asked to hear our story; he was curious of what exactly the NICU meant to us. We are now speaking at their annual fundraising dinner to help bring donations in to NICU. It means so much to us that we are able to help give back in some way to the people who gave us a healthy baby to bring home.

Having a plan was great, but no part of my plan happened. I know some people think that if you do not deliver vaginally, you didn’t “give birth”. Or if you had to get an epidural you are weak and not all that a woman or mom should be. To me, being the best mom possible is doing the best thing possible. Having a cesarean section in no way changes me being a mom; it reinforces that a mother will do anything necessary to protect the life of her child.