Our journey continues at our local hospital
This is a follow up from my last post which you can read here.
So here we are. Our second day at our local hospital. My wife and I arrived at about 8 o’clock in the morning. We went straight to see our girls. We knew that they’d had an uneventful night because my wife would ring in the early hours to check when she got up to express.
The girls were still being tube fed, but we were gradually introducing them to bottles. Although, our girls didn’t take well to breastfeeding they were still having breast milk as my wife was still expressing every three hours for them.
I mentioned in a previous post that both girls were having some tests. M in particular because she was the one that had stopped growing and only weighed 2lb11 when she was born.
I have to admit that I am a worrier. Which, in situations like this aren’t good because it means I turn to Google. Don’t get me wrong I think Google is great, but when you’re worried about something it can be not so good! You end up convincing yourself of something that is just not true.
I became convinced that M might have down syndrome.
In fact I was so convinced that I had actually taken pictures of the palms of her hands so that I could compare them to the pictures I had seen on the internet.
I felt fear. A fear that our consultant had put inside of me. Instead of comforting me and my wife in this difficult time, she was anything, but comforting and I was starting dislike her.
We so desperately wanted to just bring our girls home. We soon came to the realisation that the girls were not going to be discharged until there weight had increased significantly.
The hospital staff had been adding human fortifier to the girls milk since they’d been born and they were regularly drinking 30ml every three hours. It doesn’t sound like much does it, 30ml, but that’s the most they would drink and they’d take a good half hour to drink that small amount.
As time went on our lives became a strict routine. Every three hours we would feed the girls and do their ‘cares’. That’s what changing your babies nappy and washing your baby was called in special care – cares.
Every day we faced the same routine and every night that went by it got harder and harder to leave our girls in hospital, whilst we went home.
Things changed slightly over time. I would drop my wife to the hospital around 7am every morning, go to work and then return to the hospital mid afternoon. We’d stay in the hospital until around 11pm.
It was very tiring but somehow you just find the energy that you need to do it.
I kept asking if there was any news, but there never was. This made me worry even more.
In my next post I’ll talk about our girls being moved into the nursery room. The last place before we would be allowed to bring them home.
