Cliches

Three cliches of whose truth-modified-I have become quite convinced since giving birth to a micropreemie and my subsequent experience in the NICU:

Anything can happen...yes, even to you.

You can't win...but you've got to try. 

Anything can happen

Like you can be low-risk (except being of advanced maternal age at 35) and do all the right things: exercise moderately, eat veggies and whole grains and resist the urge to gorge on French Fries and gelato, not smoke, not drink, and certainly not partake of illegal or legal narcotics, take your nasty-assed prenatal vitamin that constipates you for days, get prenatal care early, avoid excess caffeine, etc. You can do all of that and still, for no apparent reason that anybody can figure out, give birth to a 1'14" baby just as you're hitting 27 weeks. 

If that happened, anything can happen. Yes, to you. Because this is the type of thing that happens to other people. It's the type of thing you hear about in the news or read about in the March of Dimes fundraising appeal. It's not the type of thing that happens to someone like you. Until it does. So, yeah, anything can happen. 

You can't win...but you've got to try.

The social worker assigned by the hospital agrees with me on this. You've got to try to keep all the balls in the air. You know, take care of the 2-year old, spend as much time as possible with the baby in the hospital, stay up on her care, eat right, exercise, sleep, keep your household running to some degree, maybe get some work done. You can't just let your life fall all apart, which is what will happen if you give up. But dig it. You will not win. Just accept that. You will try to get it all right, but you will end up getting about 25%-on a good day. 

It's better than zero. That's what I remind myself when I think about checking out (like there's anywhere else for me to go). Better to get 10% or 25% right today than to just forfeit. 

Impossible Choices

Being a parent with a micropreemie in the NICU, you are faced with impossible choices. From the first, you struggle with whether to celebrate the birth of a new life or to mourn the too-early birth of a baby whose very survival and health are tenuous. Then the medical decisions begin. Yes to the PICC line or no? Yes to the transfusion or no? Steroids or bronchoscopy...or both? 

They are never clear choices. Being no expert, you hardly feel qualified to weigh them against each other. Your heart rebels against them all. Really, you usually don't actually have a choice. I think the doctor sometimes presents them to you just to let you into his or her (in our case, his) thought process a little. But it's usually not a real choice, unless the choice is allowing this risky thing to be done to your baby, which might make her better but could make her sicker, or not doing the risky thing, which will almost definitely end with her getting sicker. I guess I'll take door number one. As my 2-year old would say, "Scary, scary". 

Every day is very scary right now. 

People keep telling me they couldn't possibly handle what I'm going through right now, that I'm so much stronger than they can imagine being. I'm not so strong. At times, I am wilting inside. I certainly didn't walk into this heartier than anybody else. I distinctly remember thinking, long ago before all this happened, that I wouldn't be able to bear walking out of the hospital and leaving my baby behind. Although I knew nothing about preemies and NICUs back then, I definitely would not have thought I could face that. But I am, not because I'm especially strong, but because I have to. Nobody's giving me a choice. Surely, nobody has given my baby a choice. She doesn't get to decide whether to be here, living in an isolette, intubated, sedated. And because she doesn't get to decide, neither do I. I either show up and walk this road beside her or I renege on my promise to be her mother, all that that entails. Even if it's this. Especially if it's this. It is what any mother would do. It is what mothers do in the NICU every day. It is nothing extraordinary really. The babies are the ones who are extraordinary. We are just unwilling passengers.

Human beings rise to the level of the challenges that threaten to drown us. That is what we do, whether in the face of this or something else. We find our strength as we need it. We do the unimaginable not because we are unimaginably strong but because the alternative-giving up-is unacceptable, especially when there is still hope to hold on to. No, I am not strong. Just human.