When your baby is sick or born premature, there’s one thing you’ll undoubtedly experience: receiving bad news.
The thing is, it’s such a tense and emotional experience anyway, that it can be hard to comprehend and process individual pieces of bad news without feeling like you’re losing it.
I start this piece with a confession: up until 2019, I’d never heard about World Prematurity Day. I never paid attention to it, I never even knew about it.
Really though, I never had a reason to… until my sons were born 13 weeks prematurely. Now, as a parent of preterm children, it’s a day I pay full attention to.
September is NICU Awareness Month. In this post, I’ll share some further information about this event, why it’s important, and some helpful resources for families impacted by having children in neonatal care.
I never really gave much thought to what my first Father’s Day as a dad would bring.
Presumably, novelty socks, personalised pint glasses and some chocolates would feature prominently. I certainly didn’t envisage spending it in hospital – yet that’s exactly what happened. If your sons insist on making an extremely premature entrance into the world, that’s the way it goes.
This is what it’s like to spend Father’s Day on a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).
I thought I’d taken a wrong turn and ended up in a zoo.
Man, I was confused. I thought this was a hospital for sick babies. Why were we talking about animals?
What the hell is kangaroo care?
Turns out it’s a really important part of the neonatal journey – both for parents and baby. And while it’s essential for mums to take part, it’s also something that dads can participate in… and we even bring our own benefits to the party.
Here’s how…
One of the best ways I found of bonding with my sons in the neonatal unit was by reading to them.
At the time, it felt almost futile. Here I was, sometimes in a room of other parents, feeling self-conscious about being overheard reading silly rhymes aloud. All while the boys slept (most of the time) through it.
Was there actually any point? As it turns out – yes, there was. Here, I dig deeper into the benefits of reading to your baby in the NICU.
Even the best laid plans can be obliterated in devastating fashion by a premature baby’s arrival.
Much of a pregnancy involves excitement and forward planning, and yet having a preterm baby can mean those plans are put on ice… or even shelved completely.
Here are some of the things that parents of a premature baby may miss out on.
For some families, the only lights this Christmas will be those of the NICU. Jingle bells will be replaced by alarm bells.
Indeed, for those that celebrate Christmas, a festive spell on a neonatal ward can be memorable, but often only because of the hardship it brings. While many families are celebrating together in the comfort of their homes, those parents with sick or premature children are out of their comfort zones and often out of others’ minds.
Tayla Esgate-Menear was one of those parents in 2019. Here, she shares her experience of Christmas in NICU.
Business as unusual.
I’m lucky to do a job that I enjoy. But for several weeks in summer 2019, I ambled through my role in a state of fugue. I can tell you precious little about what I did at work at that time and even less about how often my mind was fully on the task at hand.
The reason, though, is simple: my mind was elsewhere. Specifically, it was in a hospital 25+ miles away. It was with my sons, still wired to their machines. It was with my wife, suddenly walking the parenthood road we’d trodden together, alone. And it was with the nurses and doctors caring for our sons.
Alas, we have bills to pay… and so a month after our boys crashed into the world, I once again showed my face in the office. This is what it’s like to return to work when your babies are in the hospital.
Out of darkness comes light.
It feels almost criminal to even think of this awful situation as a positive in anyone’s life. Yet the coronavirus pandemic and its trail of destruction somehow left the cards stacked in my favour. It gave me the unique opportunity to relive my paternity leave. Or to put it more accurately, live the paternity leave I never had.