The First 24 Hours

UPDATE: My wife and I have started our training to learn how to feed our son through his nose and how to check his oxygen and other stuff. We've started doing live trial runs where we are staying overnight at the hospital and trying to do everything ourselves. Sad but true...I've been spoiled the last 8 weeks. No waking up in the middle night because he's crying, no being awake at ungodly hours, no having to coordinate with my wife who's turn it is to wake up. But now...it just got real. We're actually doing this. Actually becoming parents. We are doing about 90% of the work with him now. Because of that, it's 1:30am and it's my turn to feed him. The feeding takes about an hour to complete, so I have some time to sit down and keep going with the apparently entertaining blog I've started. It's been unbelievable how many views I've had on this blog since I started it. I never expected that many people to read it. I better make this even more entertaining to make it worth your times. But thank you so much for your positive comments and feedback. It's been a blessing to see how much we are loved even though we've basically fallen off the face of the Earth with our son.

Anyways...

My last blog post left off with us handing off our son to the NICU team at the hospital. They would decide his future. Because of his omphalocele situation (liver was outside his body), he would need several surgeries to get it inside his body and functioning. I was exhausted, my wife was exhausted, we were both ready for a nap.

But our baby looked so helpless. Even though I don't especially like babies, I liked this one. He had curly hair just like mine and looked so peaceful when he was sleeping for the short 3 seconds before all the nurses started poking around at him.

My wife was already back in her room recovering while I was hanging out with the team of about 20 members. If there's one thing I hate, it's large groups. I can't stand large groups. Especially when they're all talking at the same time.

The surgeon started telling me all about his plan how he would approach this situation. Because the liver was inside a membrane, the whole thing was too big to fit snugly in our son's body. In a couple of days, he would try push the liver into the body as much as he could, then leave it for a week. Push it some more, then another week. Then more. And so on about 4-6 times, then stitch our kid up and send him home.

Umm. That seems quite uncomfortable. I wasn't impressed with that plan, but it seemed like the best thing to do.

Then all twenty people in the room wanted to talk to me at the same time about twenty different things. I think I now understand how celebrities feel. There was the head nurse asking me to sign all the papers, there was a social worker wanting to know if I we needed help paying bills (exactly how expensive is this going to be anyways?), there was the receptionist trying to tell me how to get back in the NICU if I left, and there was a lady who kept asking me if I was hungry. I'm always hungry. But she never did get me any food...

That mess combined with my lack of sleep plus my abnormal range of emotions in the last 24 hours was making me a bit cranky. I think they must have noticed because they gave me some apple juice and sent me off to my wife's room as well to get some sleep.

Sleep? Yeah right. I don't want to sleep on that stupid couch again. I want the bed.

Once I arrived to her room, we were transferred to a smaller recovery room. No couch. Just two oversized chairs and a bed. Forget that. I snuggled with my wife in her bed for what felt like 12 seconds (really, it was 30 minutes) when our nurse came in with a grim look on her face.

This day was not getting better.

They had done an echocardiogram on our son's heart. Remember when he had a hole in his heart and the heart doctor said it wasn't going to be a problem after he was born?

The surgeon saw the hole in the heart and also found a possible issue with one of his valves. He immediately backed out of the surgery. He wanted no part of the risk of the heart stopping or something during the surgery. We were being transferred to the Primary Children's hospital where they would do the surgery.

Oh, okay. Sounds good. So we'll just drive him up there tomorrow or something?

"The ambulance will be here in 30 minutes. Be ready."

Ambulance...? My desire to ride in an ambulance with the lights on just for fun since I was 10 years old quickly vanished.

Good thing my mind hadn't come back to reality yet. I still felt like I was dreaming. In the last 12 hours, I had seen things that I'm pretty sure 90% of people have never seen before. I had heard medical terms I'm pretty sure were 90% made up.

Ambulance? Okay, sure, why not? How much worse can this day get?

But, what bothered me the most about riding in the ambulance was that my wife had to stay behind. Only I got to go since she wasn't quite recovered yet from the delivery and couldn't be discharged from the hospital. This was HER kid! She wanted this kid more than me! She should get to go too!

Nope.

So I packed up my things. Really, just my toothbrush. I hadn't planned on staying more than one night away from my home. Headed back up with my wife to the NICU where I saw my son about to be placed into those scary glass boxes where you can only put your hands inside.

And that's when I finally lost it.

I had been doing so good for so long.
4 months of holding it together after we found out the diagnosis.
24 hours removed from a doctor telling us we had to get the baby out immediately or he might die.
9 hours of watching my wife go through labor and hoping they would both make it out alive.
3 hours after he was born of wondering what would happen to him...

I had been doing so good of staying numb to the pain and anxiety and pretending nothing was wrong.

Seeing my son in that glass box getting ready to be loaded into an ambulance was when the magnitude of the situation finally hit me like a ton of bricks. I just couldn't hold myself together anymore.

After a few minutes, I kind of regained my composure, said goodbye to my wife, and followed my son and the paramedics into the ambulance and off we went to SLC.

A good friend of mine suggested I write down my thoughts and feelings. They were still raw and it would be a good experience for me to look back later and read them. So I did. I filled up three pages. It felt good to get it all out.

What amazed me about this whole experience was how calm our son was. Sure, he cried a little right after he was born. But once he was put in the NICU, he was pretty calm the whole time. He slept the whole way up to SLC. Maybe it was the medicine. But whatever it was, it was contagious. The whole ambulance ride was just a calm feeling with him, me, and the two paramedics. It was like we all knew everything would be alright.

We arrived to the hospital and I met with the surgeon right away. He told me his plan would be a bit more aggressive than the original surgeon's plan. He wanted to try to squash the whole liver inside the first time and call it good. I was so emotionally and mentally spent after talking with so many people that day, I couldn't even process what was coming out of his mouth. The only thing I understood was:

"Surgery first thing tomorrow morning."

Yep. Of course. Our superhero son can put up with anything. Including surgery less than 24 hours of being born.

My parents live pretty close to the hospital, so after the surgeon finished explaining his plan of action and I signed my consent, I went home with them and completely crashed.

It would be nice if I could just wake up from this nightmare.