The moment had come. That moment when all of the hard work pays off. The moment when you touch your baby for the first time, when you first hear the sound of their voice. The relief. The high. Lev, whose name means “heart” in Hebrew, was born. “He’s here, oh my god, he’s here!,” I said, as they put him on my chest. But, he was silent, blue, and limp. He was alive, but he was deeply struggling. Before I could bring my hands to touch him, the alarm bells went off and the midwife quickly cut his cord and handed him to a slew of pediatric staff that had flooded into our hospital room in response to the alarm. For several minutes, the team surrounded him on a warmer across the room trying to resuscitate him. I couldn’t see him. He was still silent and all I could hear was the murmurs of the team. I kept asking if he was going to be okay, but no one would answer me. My husband stood behind them with immense fear and shock in his eyes. The midwife who received Lev was in front of me concentrating on sewing my third degree tear as if there wasn’t this other emergency happening several feet away. My doula stayed by my side and reminded me to talk to Lev. I did. “I love you, baby. It’s going to be okay. Mama’s here,” I said with a shaking voice. I was reassuring Lev that it would be okay without knowing that to be true. Then, one of the pediatric team members said, “We need to take him to the NICU. Someone will come talk to you soon.” And they left the room with Lev. “But is he going to be okay?” No answer. “Go, go with them!”, I demanded of my husband. And now, the room was quiet. No crying baby. No tears of joy. Just silence. And shock. And fear. Confusion. Pain. Disorientation. Shaking. Nauseous. Weak. Exhausted. “Is he going to be okay?,” I asked my doula, but she could not answer.
Some time later, a NICU staff came to talk to me in my postpartum room. They shared that Lev had inhaled meconium and had aspirated. They had resuscitated him. He was now breathing, with support. I could go see him in the NICU when I was ready. But I wasn’t ready. I felt so weak I could barely move. I was still shaking. I felt drugged. I asked my doula, “Will I ever feel normal again?”
Five hours after Lev was born I was wheeled to the NICU to see him. He was in the little clear box and had lots of tubes and cords. The room was flooded with beeping from all his vitals being monitored. It’s a far cry from the relaxing cuddles I expected during the much awaited golden hour. I still felt too weak to hold him, but I touched him for the first time. In some ways, he looked so foreign to me. The situation felt so wrong. This couldn’t be my story. It almost felt like he wasn’t mine. That the whole experience wasn’t mine. Someone got it wrong. I then bled through my pajamas and all over the floor of the NICU. The postpartum nurse cleaned it up and I was wheeled back to my room, away from my baby. Later, I would go back to the NICU and hold Lev and nurse him for the first time. He was finally breathing on his own, but the NICU team had run a bunch of tests and there were more concerns they wanted to explore.
After my second night in the postpartum unit I was discharged. I was fine, or rather, I wasn’t thinking about how I was doing. I could only think of Lev. I moved from the postpartum room to staying in Lev’s NICU room. I had imagined healing at home with my baby. I had imagined lots of time in bed cuddling and nursing while my husband brought nourishing food for me and refilled my big water cup. I didn’t imagine healing on a recliner chair, in a room where no food was allowed, and a hospital unit where there were no pads in the bathroom and no water cooler to refill my cup. Once I was discharged and staying in the NICU, there was no check-in from the postpartum unit around how I was healing. I was on my own. I felt like a shell of a human that once was.
The days passed and Lev got caught in a web of over-medicalization. Too many tests, an abundance of hospital caution, and so much monitoring led to a week dedicated to ruling all sorts of things out, none of which were related to his meconium aspiration. We felt so vulnerable, so desperate, so unknowing. So willing to do anything to make sure he would be okay. But still, no one could ever reassure us that he would be okay, that we would be able to take him home. After a very long week in the NICU, we were discharged. I was grateful that we only had to stay a week, that we got to leave with our baby, and that ultimately, he was okay.
With a simultaneous mix of love, gratitude, exhaustion, and pain we launched into a chaotic postpartum period. Since our birth experience, I’ve been working to heal from the sorrow, guilt, disappointment, loss, confusion, and fear that surrounded Lev’s birth. In my healing work I have learned that I will never be “healed.” And not in a dismal way. The thing is, it’s not about the endpoint. The experience of his birth transformed me forever and the active process of healing will also be forever. For me, there is no such thing as healed. Healing, learning, growing and adapting will be forever. My healing won’t be linear. It won’t be fast because there’s no such thing when there is no endpoint. And that’s okay. And most importantly, my sweetheart Lev, he’s okay. More than okay! As I reflect back on my story, I can whisper to my prior self, “Yes! He’s going to be okay! And you will too.”
About Cody:
Hi, I’m Cody! I am a health educator, advocate, and a mother to my incredible boy, Lev! After my birth and postpartum experience, I decided to shift my decade-long career in sexual & reproductive health education for a career in childbirth education & postpartum support. Along with my friend and business partner, I’ve recently established @intrinsic.birth, which provides empowering, science-based childbirth education & postpartum support. In my personal life, I love being outside, dance, and other creative endeavors!
