Time to Heal

As many but not all of you know, my daughter is a preemie. She was born 8 weeks early. Although we told almost every day that our little girl that was (born at 3lbs 15oz and was just 16 inches long) one of the biggest and healthiest babies in the NICU she was still there for 21 days followed by a 10 day stay at a transitional nursery in a different hospital. During her stay my husband and I were informed that our daughter was born with a hole in her heart. We also found out that she has a condition call SVT (This can cause her heart to race at a pace too high for her body to handle and if untreated she could die) she also had acid reflux that was causing her heart drop to drop to dangerous levels. As you can imagine these were some very hard things for my husband and I to hear.

Neither one of us had ever been through anything like this before and we didn't know where to turn. We had an 18 month old at home that we had to care for while I was a full time college student and my husband worked full time and we still spent at least 3-4 hours a day sitting in the NICU with our daughter. To say the least we were burnt out. Neither of us knew it though. I think our bodies went into survival mode and we did whatever we needed to in order to make it through the day. Somehow I even finished the semester with 3 A's and 1 B.

What I didn't realize is the toll the NICU and our experience had taken on me, both mentally and physically. Not ever going through anything like this before I thought that our daughter would come home and everything would be back to "normal". We would live our lives like any other family with two children. Well in part I was right. Only our "normal" was having a nurse come visit once a week to check on the baby, waking our daughter every 1-2 hours because she needed a different medicine or needed to eat, and lets not forget about the apnea monitor that she came home with. Yes, the wires we were sooo happy to get rid of had now followed us home!!

I have forgotten to mention that our daughter would sometimes stop breathing while she was asleep so we would have to wake her whenever the alarm would go off. Most parents probably are thinking the same thing I was "well at least I won't be up all night checking to see if she is breathing like I did with our son" WRONG!!!! Instead I was up all night checking to make sure the monitor was working. I quickly learned that no parent of a newborn ever gets any sleep!! I also found out that the midnight phone calls didn't stop with us coming home either.

One night I couldn't sleep so I decided to get a shower to help me sleep. It was about 3:30 am, my husband was at work and both children were asleep. I was about to get out of the shower and I heard what I thought was our smoke alarm, "Oh great the shower was too hot again, I better turn it off before it wakes the kids." As I was running down the hall the sound quickly stopped and I realized it was actually the baby's monitor. When I got to our daughter her lips were blue and she was covered in spit-up. My body went into over drive and I flipped her over, cleared her airway, and was perfectly fine. While it only lasted a few seconds before I was able to get her cleaned off and back to sleep, I totally freaked and had to call my husband and cry to him. I of course didn't get sleep that night at all.

I am telling you all of this to say this, I recently realized when asked to share a picture of my daughter that I haven't fully healed from our NICU experience. I still have break downs on our daughter's birthday and on her due date. On the day I was admitted to the hospital and the day I realized that I was going to have a preemie, and lots of days in between.

You may ask what all of this has to do with weight loss. Well I'll tell you! While pregnant with my daughter I gained 60!!! lbs. I have been holding onto that weight for the last 2 1/2 years. I realize as I am loosing that weight that I was scared to get rid of it, like if I lost the weight that I gained while pregnant I would somehow loose my daughter too. I know it sounds silly to many of you but for me it is/was a reality. People tell me all the time that there are reasons deeper than our health as to why we need to loose weight and why we put it on in the first place. I know totally understand what they mean by this now.

My loosing weight is a way for me to fully heal and say good-bye to the NICU forever!!! Yes I will need to take my daughter to follow up with her doctors and yes we will always have those memories and we will always be able to tell people our story, but it will be a part of us that has helped us to become stronger people. It will no longer be holding us back!!

As a part of my weight loss journey I have decided to get my daughter's baby book out and finish it up to this point! I am no longer going to rob her of that. It is something that she will want to look at when she gets older and she will want to know "her story".

This week was HUGE for!!! Not on the scale but mentally and emotionally because I found what one of my BIG factors are and I am now able to face my fear head on!! I will be able to heal and I can finally look at my healthy little girl as just that and not a tiny baby still stuck in the NICU being held back by "things full term babies have but are never checked for". Today we have no meds and no wires. Today all we have is your everyday "toddler problems". Mommy I peed on the floor,or where's my cuppie. My brother hit me or he isn't sharing his toys. I don't want to eat this or I just want to play outside.

At this point in the game I think it is safe to say that our daughter is healed from the NICU and it is time for her mommy to do the same. Part of that is going to be sharing with you her story and this post. It is a fresh start to getting my life back!!!

I leave you with some photos to put a face with the story:

This is our daughter when she was about a week old (top) the picture on the right is her first day in an open crib (almost 2 weeks) and the picture left is Christmas Eve (she was 32days old and her first FULL day home)

I feel no words needed to explain this...her face says it all
#toddlermomproblems

This is myself and my daughter on Easter

The top is her playing dentist with play doh. The bottom is how I found her this morning and to the right she is showing off her fashion sense :-)