My Daughters and neo-natal 

If you are a regular reader of my blog you might have read that that my 19 year old daughter is currently in her second year of university studying child nursing. Part of the course involves going out on placement to different hospitals and gaining experience in all the facets of child nursing.

The placement where she is just about to finish has been on a high dependence neo-natal unit in a large hospital. On a regular basis I have spoken to her and it has been a rollercoaster of emotion that she has experienced with little babies being born, but sadly not surviving, and dealing with parents that are in a very distraught state hoping that their baby will be okay.

All of our phone calls took me back to when my twin daughters, her sisters, were born at 34 weeks and spent 4 weeks in neo-natal. The emotional rollercoaster that a special care baby unit sends you on is impossible to describe. I suppose you live in a constant feeling of stress and disbelief that this is happening, the feeling of anger, crying in fact any and every emotion you have are all mashed together and you just want to explode or burst into tears.

There was one moment that to this day will always haunt me and the memory and the feeling of helplessness I had for that moment in my life was totally overpowering.
R was born first and the bigger of the girls although still only 4lb 3ozs. I always thought that if there was going to be issues it would have been with M as she was born at 2lb 11ozs. How wrong I was.

Within a couple of hours of being born, I reaslised that R was struggling to breathe. She seemed to take her tummy in so far it was popping out of her back. I knew something was wrong and the consultant informed me that her lungs had not developed fully and they needed to put her on a ventilator.

At that moment I felt alone, helpless and simply distraught. My wife had still not seen our twin girls since they were born and that must have been worse. At least I was able to see what was going on. It was a very difficult moment telling my wife that R was on a ventilator and trying to hold it together, and say that everything would be ok. If I’m honest I didn’t know if it would be ok. 

My older three children were on there way to the hospital to see their sisters so I met them downstairs in the reception area and all of a sudden the last few hours became too much to bear and I broke down. My daughter who is training to be a child nurse at the time was just 15 years old, but I remember clearly her hugging me and being positive and telling me everything would be ok.

Was this the moment that she decided that nursing was the career for her? Whether it was a conscious decision I’m not sure, but from that moment it was where she was going.

Now in second year of her child nursing course, she has had to return to a neo-natal unit, but from a very different perspective working in a highly emotionally charged environment is difficult I’m sure, but these last few weeks I have seen her mature and grow up so very quickly into a very responsible adult.

My belief is that once she is qualified she will start working within a neo-natal unit. I truly think it is what she’s meant to do.