Beyond the NICU

My second baby (1m) has been home from the NICU for two weeks now! Having your baby taken to the NICU is traumatic and we are so lucky he was only there for 11 days and that he came home healthy. Now that he is home, I am trying to heal as well. As part of my healing I started putting together a list of the positives instead of dwelling on the fear and separation I felt. While he was in the NICU I barely left his side, literally parked a trailer at the hospital to stay near him, so some of the positives are observations from being in the hospital. None of this is medical advice.

1. Maybe I’m an idiot but with my first baby boy I got peed on all the time. In the nicu the nurses would set up the new diaper, under the current diaper he was wearing and then do a quick wipe, pull and replace. Way more effective and less likely to get peed on, this is how we do diaper changes at home now.

2. With my first baby we would literally wake him up to change his diaper if we heard him fart, we hated the idea of a dirty diaper! Even if we just got
   him to sleep! In the NICU at first I would tell the nurses, “hey I think he pooped, should we change him” and they were like no he’s sleeping, we will at care times. Never crossed my mind that was an option.

3. With my first we did the wake up 2 hours from the start of each feed and it was brutal. The hospital was doing every 3 hours and once our baby was ad lib, they were letting him sleep until 4 hours before waking for his next feed, you bet we brought that home with us. (Granted our baby was a very healthy weight.)

4. Weight means so much more than I ever knew. Our baby was in there for breathing issues and we learned at discharge that his weight gain was a key indicator that his lungs had healed because his body was no longer exerting more energy than it should be by breathing to rapidly too often.

5. With my first I was a stickler about sterilization, between every use. I’m still super clean but between pumps in the hospital I was given a full handout about simply cleaning pump parts with warm water, soap and rinse. So this is what I am doing now and only sterilizing once a day.

6. The nurses were incredible, even showed us how to better hold a bottle (we should be pros we already raised a kid) but they would show up how holding it just slightly like 1 degree lower would help the baby not take in so much air, basically made those green parts in the dr browns bottle unnecessary.

7. They reinforced for us to advocate for ourselves. The dr and nurses in the nicu were shocked at how long our baby was in the recovery room with us before being taken to the nicu, despite us bringing up concerns with his eating, breathing and noises. We kept being told by a pediatrician it was normal, or from a fast delivery, and we trusted that dr. In reality we should have trusted ourselves especially as second time parents. That is guilt I still will work through but I’m so thankful to the nurse who finally flagged what we were seeing and took him to get the care he needed

Maybe I was just super anal with my first born, or followed too much online advice but I thought these were interesting and practical observations from the pros that have made my life easier since being home, plus this was therapeutic to think on the positives, so thanks reddit!