Tales from the NICU

Baby Clara gives everyone a scare, and Mom learns some lessons along the way.

By Meagan Francis

As I shared in Clara's birth story, the day after she was born she turned a very frightening shade of blue several times in an hour.

The first time it happened, I called the pediatrician, who said that sometimes babies get a little milk caught in their throats and their body thinks they're choking. "If it happens once, I'm not worried about it, if it's a pattern, then I'm concerned," he said.



Twenty minutes later it happened again. She came around quickly once more, but this time we called the paramedics....and felt a bit sheepish when they got there and found nothing wrong with her.  

And then, ten or fifteen minutes later, it happened once more. This time, her eyes were open, but she looked "checked out". Her body was limp. She was breathing, but taking shallow, choky breaths, and her tongue was on the roof of her mouth. She didn't respond right away to the water on the feet--we had to talk loudly and rub her back to get her to snap out of it.  And then we raced to the ER.

All the way to the ER, she looked healthy and pink. She was fine through triage, and for the first few minutes after the doctor was examining her (probably thinking we were just being paranoid new parents). But as I was changing her second poopy diaper ever on the exam table, she went blue again.

That's when things got crazy. The doctor jumped up and started rubbing and jiggling her, nurses came running in with oxygen, and she was moved to a larger room where they put her on a vent, gave her a sedative, and re-opened her umbilicus to access the blood vessels there. I followed behind helplessly, sitting on a chair in a corner. A doctor was brought in from the pediatric floor to examine her.

"Unfortunately," she tossed at me over her shoulder, "With a baby this age having these kinds of symptoms, it's most likely congenital heart disease."

At which point my husband looked as though he might have a heart attack himself.

Many hours of worrying (spent perched on a hard plastic chair at one day postpartum) later, the transport team from a larger hospital an hour away arrived.  When we got there, we talked to the neonatologist, who told us she believed it was not a heart problem but a seizure--most likely treatable with medication, but only time and tests would tell.

I never thought I could be so relieved to hear that my baby potentially had problems with her brain.

The next two days are a blur of tubes, wires, machines that beep and an endless parade of nurses, doctors and other people in charge (and guess what? I wasn't one of the people in charge.). For two days, as I sat numbly pumping my milk and watching it get fed to a zonked-out Clara through a tube, I felt less like a mother than a milk machine.

As it turned out, an EEG showed that Clara was having abnormal brain activity, and a CT scan showed bleeding in her temporal lobe. The doctors believe that the bleeding caused seizures, which caused her to stop breathing effectively and turn blue. Her prognosis is good: these kinds of bleeds aren't terribly uncommon, and usually resolve themselves in a few months' time. Clara will have to be on medication and follow up with a neurologist until she gets the all-clear, but as of now, she's nursing again, off of most of the tubes and wires, and will be ready to come home with us very soon.

So, after our traumatic first few days, I'm trying to act just like I would if we were hanging out together at home: lots of sitting in the recliner snuggling and nursing, and not much else. The only difference is that I'm sitting in the middle of a busy NICU with nurses coming in and out, doctors doing rounds, alarms going off every so often, and other babies crying in the background.  The other difference is that the recliner is made of plastic and might just be the most uncomfortable chair I've ever sat in, including the folding chair in the ER. And, of course, my other children are at home with family instead of with me, I'm eating a lot of boring cafeteria food, and...let's face it, nothing is really normal at all. But Clara's getting better, and I'm trying to focus on that and not the frustrating parts.

Remember what I said about there being no guarantees? What a lesson learned. I'd come to take my babies' health so for granted, and this experience has been terrifying, exhausting, frustrating and traumatic in pretty much every way. I hope that I can relax and enjoy my baby when we get home instead of second-guessing every normal, twitchy newborn movement or weird breathing pattern, but one thing is sure: I have a whole new understanding of paranoid parents.

We have every reason to believe that Clara will be totally fine, and yet, there is never any way to know for certain, no matter how healthy a baby seems. Just one more reason to really pay attention, enjoy the cuddles and snuggles fully, and take advantage of every single day we're with our kids.