Six weeks in NICU

I'd never been to a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit in a hospital before.  Our birth team had planned for the most beautiful natural, loving birth for our baby, so it was quite a shock when I entered the room to see Leroy in the hospital. I knew from a short conversation from Peter that things were not good, but it was still a shock.

Our darling boy laying there with tubes and bits hanging off him everywhere. It was very intense and I tried with all my brain power to take everything in. Our consultant Amanda was very patient and compassionate, and we asked many, many questions.

I was also attempting to recover physically from the birth (no tears or stitches thank goodness) and I knew that I should be laying down and resting to allow my body to heal, but I found it hard to leave Leroy's side.

In some ways those 6 weeks at the Royal Children's in Melbourne are a blur, and in other ways the memories are still very clear.  The RCH is a world class facility, there is no doubt about it, and we are eternally grateful to all the staff at RCH who went to incredible efforts to save Leroy's life.  We also developed some great relationships with the nursing staff over the weeks.  This however, did not stop us from pushing the envelope and advocating for what we wanted for Leroy.

We asked for our chiropractors to be able to come in to see Leroy and adjust him - this was not approved until we had the RCH lawyers draw up a document for us to sign. They said that no one had ever asked them about this before, so we are very thankful to Rod Hunt who is the Director of the Butterfly Ward, who chased it up and made it happen. There were little things too, like using our organic lip balm to keep Leroy's lips moist, rather than the petro-chemical fllled vaseline that they were using.

Then there was the reclining chair. After Leroy came off the ventilator, he found it hard to breath in any position except on his front. For all kinds of reasons we were very keen to get Leroy on our skin (Kangaroo care) which meant that we needed a chair that reclined so he could lay on our front.

One of the many sessions we spent
with Leroy skin to skin

There were none to be found, until we talked to the right people, and after a serious search, a reclining chair was located.  Every day we would go and spend as much time as we could with Leroy on our skin. Peter and I found this very healing.

Through it all, we were aware that we just couldn't keep in touch with everyone - it was all we could do just to hold ourselves together.  I was (and still am) expressing my breast milk every 3-4 hours round the clock, and we had so many meetings with different medical staff, departments and support services, it was hard to keep up. Not to mention the fact that we were emotionally spent. Peter and I would just hold each other and bawl our eyes out, feeling like we were in the middle of our worst nightmare, but one we could not escape from. Grief was always just under the surface.

Thankfully the RCH gave us accommodation at the hospital for the first 12 nights, and after a few more nights in Melbourne, we decided to go home. For the two weeks we were in the hospital Dylan had been staying with my sister and mum, and I was finding it increasingly difficult to be away from him. Even so, it was a difficult decision. Even though we weren't as near to Leroy being at home, we were much happier and felt much more grounded and better able to cope being in our own home surrounded by the forest, the chooks and the sky.  This in turn meant that we were better able to take care of Leroy and be with him.

By far, it was the hardest 6 weeks of my life. I could write ten blogs about what happened, about the conversations we had with the paediatricians, being asked whether we wanted Leroy to be resuscitated if he needed it, about their very grim prognoses, about trying to get Leroy in a stable enough condition to get him out of the hospital, and about trying to hold it together and just get through it.

We knew that the longer Leroy spent at RCH, the worse his condition would get. He had already contracted strep and golden staph at the hospital  and we were getting desperate to get him home.

Thankfully on 1st May we did get Leroy home, and although it has had its challenges, we have have been incredibly well supported, and we have not regretted it for one second. This is where Leroy was born, and it is where he belongs. With his family who love him very very much.