Mother’s Day 2014
Today is one of those days I have to convince myself to get out of bed. It's the season of our first several anniversaries with Isla, from getting through surgery and moving to the 8th floor, getting discharged, and spending those six glorious days in the real world.
Mother's day last year started out wonderful--we played in the apartment on her activity mat, she in her little ducky zip-up sleep sack, and that's when I took the video of her waving her arms around and grinning at her reflection in the mirror. In the afternoon, we slathered Isla in sunscreen and took her to White Rock Lake in Dallas for a picnic and a long walk. We hung out in the sunshine and she napped. As the day rolled on, I got a hankering for cheesecake and we went to the Cheesecake Factory for dinner. I remember as we waited for a table, we had her car seat covered so people wouldn't sneeze or cough on her, and we marveled at how easy it was to cart her around without being attached to any tubes or stickers. We got seated, ate, and out friend Mal stopped by on her way back to college in San Marcos to sit with us for about an hour. She had Isla pretty much the whole time. It was a great night.
Afterwards, we went back to the apartment and did her nightly assessment. Her oxygen saturations had dropped 10 points to 75%, and I freaked out. Dan tried to calm me down and reminded me that the circumstances under which we took the readings were unusual--we'd been out all day, in the sunshine, and it was now late at night after we'd normally be in bed. We had listened to the Safe at Home guidelines over and over again, and they had always told us to call if her sat readings were low. So I called in a fret, and was told to bring her in for a "quick peek". We threw her stuff together and ran to the car, where she whipped out her feeding tube on the ride to Children's.
Long story short, we spent the night in the emergency room and never left the hospital after that. I'll never remember the look of fear on her face when we took her into the ER and they promptly put a nasal cannula on her. Within minutes she was stripped of her little button-up onesie and wrapped in a hospital blanket, fitted with heart rate monitors and electrodes, and she had once again become a generic patient. I had a sinking feeling in my heart that I should have waited to call...we could have stayed out another few days, or even a couple of weeks, before going back. The first 2 weeks we spent in the hospital after that, we were told we'd be released every other day, and it was the most up-and-down time of our lives.
Today is bittersweet and I don't know how to respond to Mother's Day wishes without it all flooding back. I feel like an imposter, and on a day like this grief feels incredibly selfish, because I cannot see past my own emotions to celebrate all the amazing moms who gave us life. I love my mom, and I just want to have my own baby back.
