Woah, Baby: Part VII

When Little Shmoo was born, I worked for a big non-profit organization as their manager of web development. I don't anymore, and this blog entry will explain why. The next couple of entries will go back and forth a little -- so much was going on during these first few months; I can't really tell the story in a linear fashion anymore.

I had twelve weeks of maternity leave in which to recover from her birth and get to know her a little bit. Those first couple of weeks were a big blur. My hormones were raging, as most women's do after giving birth, and I had more than a few crying jags in the middle of the night. I remembered some of the sensations from after Doodlebug's birth -- everyone says "sleep when the baby sleeps," which is like having someone say "Don't think about a pink elephant." Suddenly it was back, that voice that yelled in my ear the minute the baby fell asleep...it was nasty and accusatory:

"Sleep! Sleep NOW! Come on, why aren't you sleeping? You're wasting time! She's been asleep ten minutes...ten minutes you could have been SLEEPING! You're tired, for heaven's sake; why aren't you SLEEPING?! GO TO SLEEP! GO TO SLEEP  RIGHT NOW!"

It was horrible. I could not sleep on demand like that, no matter how tired I was. In addition, at night, Little Shmoo slept in a bassinet next to my bed, and there was something annoying about the sound of her next to me. I couldn't explain it, but she was always making her presence known. She was loud. She grunted, she snorted, she wiggled and rustled the sheet in the bassinet. I put a white noise machine in the bedroom and it barely helped. I couldn't get settled to sleep after nursing her. I would lie there in the dark and listen to her snort and snuffle and wonder if she was about to cry again.

When she was about two and a half weeks old, I noticed that she was breathing really fast. I only noticed this because her breathing was so loud. It started to worry me, and I called her pediatrician's office, a GIGANTIC practice with about eight doctors and walk-in hours every day. They said to bring her in. The doctor on call said her breathing was a little fast, but not dangerously so, and she was probably ok. I mentioned that she breathed often upwards of 60 breaths a minute, and the average baby (according to Dr. Spock) was supposed to breath 30-40 times a minute. I was reassured, she was ok.

Two weeks later, at her one-month well-baby checkup, her official pediatrician mentioned in a very off-hand, casual way, that she had something called tracheomalacia. I asked him to write it down. He said it was a little softness in her trachea that made her breath sound rattly, and it was nothing to worry about, and it would go away. I went home and read about it on the internet, and it didn't sound like nothing to worry about, so when she was six weeks old, we took her to a pediatric ear, nose, and throat doctor at Children's Hospital and told him what our pediatrician said. We brought a tape recording of Little Shmoo's breathing when she was distressed, her breathing after eating, her coughing sounds, and the way she sounded when she was sleeping. He did a laryngoscopy and found that not only did she have not tracheomalacia but laryngomalacia, but also that her throat was red and raw from gastroesophagal reflux. They suggested a number of lifestyle changes -- small frequent feedings (which she was already doing), sleeping on an angle, not being laid down after feedings, and switching to a carseat that kept her upright.

They also said that we might see respiratory infections a lot more serious than normal babies get. They mentioned that her throat retracted with every breath now, when she was healthy, and if she got a cold, it would likely get worse. She might need more medical care if that happened.

Doodlebug is a hearty kid -- seldom gets sick, falls and scrapes herself and gets back up again to keep playing, no health problems to speak of. True and I were not prepared for Little Shmoo. She was put on medication for the reflux, which we had to force into her screaming mouth twice a day with an oral syringe. We worried when she cried that she was in pain, and not just crying from standard baby complaints (wet diaper, hunger, etc.). She scared us.

The noise from her throat got louder and louder, and by the time I had to go back to work, it was something we had to explain to everyone who spent time with her. She was going to go to the same daycare with Doodlebug two days a week, stay home with a sitter one day a week, and two days a week, I worked from home. My hope was to ask my boss for a part-time assignment soon, so that those two days I was home, I could just be home and not work. I never got  a chance to do that...

The second day I was back at work, I came home, opened the front door, and could hear Little Shmoo breathing two rooms away. This was not the normal "Darth Baby" sounds we usually heard from her. This was VERY loud and VERY fast. Her babysitter said she'd been fussy all afternoon. I picked her up and snuggled her, thinking maybe she was just fussy about being away from me, but by the time we got Doodlebug to sleep around 8pm, if anything, Little Shmoo was worse. A quick visit to my neighbor, a nurse, reinforced my worry. Her chest was retracting with every breath. I raced to the emergency room.

That hospital stay was one night -- she had steroid breathing treatments, a bit of oxygen, and sent home. Two days later, she had her first ear infection.

A month later, another cold brought her into the pediatrician's office. The doctor on call, who would soon become our official pediatrician, began breathing treatments right there, trying to keep us out of the hospital. She was caring and kind, staying in the office until late at night, trying everything she could before finally admitting that Little Shmoo was losing to this cold. We had to go to the hospital. She needed oxygen support, monitoring, and an IV, since now her breathing required all her energy and attention and she could not nurse.

She could not nurse.

She could not nurse?

All I had been able to do for this baby consistently was feed her. I might not have been able to care for her in vitro. I might not have been able to be with her when she was born. I might not have been able to connect with her much yet, emotionally, but I could feed her. She had grown from 4 pounds 11 ounces to eleven pounds in three months, all on my milk. I was proud. Now, she needed an IV because she was so sick that she could not nurse. I was defeated.

I sat in that hospital room waiting for True (who was waiting for my brother to come stay with Doodlebug), holding my miserably sick baby, feeling whatever you'd call the female equivalent of impotency. She cried, and I gave her a pacifier, a false nipple, because my own nipples were bad for her right now. The hospital offered free meals to nursing mothers whose babies were admitted, and I remember thinking that I didn't really deserve one -- they should give the free meal to the IV stand.

By the end of the hospital stay, which was five days long, we had decided that I needed to leave my job. True made more money than I did, and Little Shmoo, according to every doctor we spoke to, would likely have this same experience with every cold. Daycare was a petri dish -- she needed to be kept away from all those germs and other kids. With most kids, you wanted them to get sick as early as possible because they get better faster and develop immunities, but with Little Shmoo, we needed to wait for her colds until after she outgrew her laryngomalacia, sometime before the age of three.

So, I left my job, where I had been for five years. It was a good job, not a great job but a good one, and it was something to do outside of mothering. I left, and it wasn't a hard decision, but it was a very sad one for me. I took Little Shmoo to work with me on my last day, and as we walked to my car in the parking lot, I looked at her and said, "OK, Shmoo. Just you and me now. Let's figure it out together."

I wasn't sure how we would, though. I just wasn't sure.

Coming next: Disappointments all around.