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This evening had gone the same as the rest that came before it. I told my supervisor I was stepping out for lunch and walked down to the hospital to spend my lunch with Zoey, as I had done every day since she was born. I washed my hands and entered the unit to find Zoey’s room empty. A smile crept onto my face and I turned around to walk into another hall and found her in her new room, a room with a view.
At 32 weeks gestation, Zoey was ready to learn the cycles of the day and start to adjust her body to living in the outside world. The sun now dictated her daily life and we were seeing our daughter for the first time.
Her old room is now referred to as the cave. I like to think of it as her old hobbit hole. The lights had to be kept dim or preferably off if it wasn’t her care time. When she was born, her eye lids were so thin that bright light hurt her underdeveloped eyes. The day she had the bilirubin blue light under her body her face had to be covered to protect her during the procedure. Talking was kept to a whisper. One of the difficulties of visiting her was the desire to take a nap because of the lack of natural light in the room.
Don’t take any of this the wrong way. It was a cozy cave, small and comfortable, a fitting place to read her The Hobbit for the first time. Now, she was old enough for a little adventure.
Zoey’s new room was about the same size as her old one but appeared much bigger with the windows overlooking the parking ramp across the street. Last night she slept through her first thunderstorm and I watched from the side of her crib as the clouds rolled through and bolts of lightning streaked across the sky in a spider web pattern.
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Not long after the move she received her first bath and was moved out of the isolette into a crib. She was no longer the little bubble girl that needed to be protected from the outside world, she was becoming a part of it. I was told ahead of time that this day was coming.
The previous occupant had left a few days before. A little girl that was also born at 23 weeks gestation and had a different story than Zoey’s. Several surgeries and complications had been a part of her story and we were afraid that Zoey was going to follow in those footsteps. We had heard about the air care flights to Ann Arbor where the surgeries had to take place. The first time we had seen the previous occupant was a week after Zoey was born. We were invited to see a little girl that was born at the same age as Zoey and walked into the room to see a giant four-pound baby quadruple the size of our newborn. I tried to roll back the tears as I learned that Zoey would one day look like the baby we were seeing. We stayed in touch with the family and learned how well that little girl was doing. After she went home the nurses asked us if we would like Zoey to have her room.
During my years of working in the emergency room, I noticed a trend with some of the trauma rooms. If a patient was brought into room A they were stabilized and moved to the trauma care unit. If they were in room B they had a tough time and there was a 50/50 chance they would die after they were moved.Trauma room C was the room I never wanted to end up in, with a long history of the patient’s family coming into view the body before going to the morgue. The room that Zoey was being moved to felt like room A. I know that this can sound superstitious, but I like to think of it as extra insurance on her care. If there is a history of patients having positive results in a certain place isn’t it smart to want them to be in that place?
Zoey’s kangaroo care has been replaced with a swaddled hold in my arms. She spends more of her time sleeping when I am with her and this has returned a lot of my time back to myself. If she is sleeping she is growing and that is the goal these days. I have been catching up on my own reading; Minimalism, Living a life of meaning, by a couple of guys that call themselves the minimalist, No is not enough by Naomi Kline and Barking Up the Wrong Tree a book I heard about on the Art of Manliness podcast. Of course, these books reflect the world I see Zoey coming into, this parenting job isn’t one that will ever have a retirement plan. I worry about Zoey’s future as most parents do with their children. Those fears subside when I hear a grunt from her crib and I look over to see those big blue eyes looking up at me and I ask “do you want to hear a story?” I set my book aside and pick up something from her shelf. “Do you want to hear what crazy mess Toad has got himself into now?”
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