The next morning, sometime. Still incredibly groggy but in immediate need of seeing my little baby girl. The nurse is very understanding, and gets a wheelchair in asap.
Getting out of bed was very humbling. I know — major surgery. I moved as slowly as I could, but it's hard to know how to move when you've been sliced in half for the first time, and I put too much strain somehow on my right side and sent this nerve-shooting ripping pain across the right side of my wound.
Pause. Catch breath.
Slowly, slowly, I make my way into the wheelchair and am given pillows etc. to make me more comfortable. I'm taken down a floor to the NICU.
I don't remember my feelings at this point. I think I felt that I was playing along — going to visit the baby as I should. But I did need to see her as well.
We checked in at the front desk in the NICU, and the procedure was briefly explained to me before I was taken into the smaller room where Ella was and introduced to her on-duty nurse, who in turn introduced me to her.
There's no way to know how such a situation would proceed, of course. My sister's note assured me of Ella's perfection, her perfectly formed creation. But could you truly comprehend being presented not with a healthy newborn into your arms, but this:
If the top picture of Ella takes up about a quarter of your decent-sized computer monitor, then you're seeing an approximate life-size representation of my little one.
Though I'd been told after delivery that she was an amazing 2 pounds at birth, in actuality she was 1 pound, 7.7 ounces. She weighed less than a large yogurt container. And she was 14 1/4 inches long, just longer than a ruler.
As I gazed at my daughter, the NICU nurse, Claudia, who would be one of Ella's main nurses during her time in the NICU here, gave me a very brief introduction to begin my degree in NICU 101. She explained what some of the wires were for, what the monitors meant. It was. Hm. Overwhelming? Oh, yes. Terrifying. Numbing.
But I don't know that much penetrated my shell-shocked state. I know now that I was in shock, that the shock would last a good 10 days. It carried me through in a fog, and I'm sure protected me on a deeper level than I can ever understand.
After a bit of time, Claudia suggested I go back to my room to give myself more chance to recover. She told me that I could visit anytime I wanted but insisted I needed to take care of myself first. I don't know if I was truly exhausted or I just couldn't take anymore or I needed an excuse to flee, but I was grateful to her for giving me a way out.
There.
I admit it, and it makes me so instantaneously regretful. Nothing would have prepared me for what was happening, nothing at all, so there was no way to know the "proper" way to be. And despite later assurances that there simply IS no "proper" way to deal with everything, I still can't help wishing I'd reacted differently. Even when I can't remember how I exactly reacted.
Isn't that the pisser? I can't give myself a break even when I don't remember the minute details of how I was. Even if I was merely human.
