Shell Shock

It's inevitable. You see someone that looks like you every day for two months, you end up talking. I got into a long conversation the other day with M, one of the other NICU moms. Her son was born two weeks after Alex, but two weeks more premature. I noticed something about M that I had not seen in myself, though it must have been there up until recently- the look of shell shock. The expression on her face did not once vary from that of bewilderment, even when she laughed, even when she listened intently to my end of the conversation. It remained a countenance of "am I dreaming all of this or did my life really just suddenly fall apart?"

The New York Times ran a piece this week about NICU parents suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, suggesting that the incessant barrage of bad news coupled  with the incessant bling of alarms brings about similar trauma in parents who go through what we've been through as does war in a soldier. You see tiny kids almost die all the time. In our case, you see your own kid die. If you are lucky enough to get out alive, you don't easily shake the memories.

It's hard to not learn about the other patients in the NICU. With ten babies or more lined up just feet apart in a big room, you hear most everything, hushed voices be damned. We see newer parents go through that we've been through with Alex, overhearing the same medical terms we had to go home and Google in order to fully understand: bradycardia, billirubin levels, spinal tap, CBC counts, ventrical bleeds, and  so on. Sometimes, we hear them deliver really bad news and, from the corner of our eyes, watch parents grapple with things so far beyond their control, it feels like they just assumed somebody else's life. Meningitis. Cerebral Palsy. Surgery.

Life really isn't fair and the NICU is a constant reminder of this truth. You do everything right and everything can still end up completely wrong. You have no control. As one grandmother said in attempt to sooth her daughter, the mother of a 3 lb boy who was having seizures, "We'll deal with the hand we are dealt."