The Story of a Premature Baby, Intensive Care Unit ICU

A few weeks later we received a call that Andrea was going to be transferred to another intensive care unit that was better equipped for these types of controls, and that we would be able to see her in a few hours. Logically, I thought the worse, as nobody had explained to me that there were special intensive care units for babies that needed to stay in the hospital for a longer amount of time, or that most hospitals had special incubators for these types of moves.

I remember arriving to the place where our daughter had been moved and we were a little shocked that the area where they had put our daughter had twelve other babies in incubators, and that was only one fourth of the amount there were in total. The nurses were playing some classical music on a radio that could barely be heard amongst the sounds of the monitors. In those moments I felt like my daughter was in a hospital, but at least the treatment the nurses gave to the babies and the environment they had set up softened the coldness of the advanced apparatuses, which seemed like the only important thing in the room.

As soon as we got there, the nurse that was in charge of Andrea gave us the medical charts and said that our daughter had gained ten grams in one day, and that her health was still stable for the conditions she was in.

I should say that during the time her stay extended, fortunately, there were many advances and few setbacks in Andrea’s state of health. However these last ones rebounded inside of me as if it was a definite diagnosis coinciding naturally with my postpartum depression.

The fear we have for the life of our baby, her fragile appearance, the precise but never concluding medical reports, the ignorance and lack of personal preparation did not help me at all, and even less so when I was trying to look for answers and finding that I did not have a lot of means to get more information.

In first place I felt incapable of understanding it all in its dimension which was the impediment so that everyone to tell me “There is no danger”, or “Your daughter is fine”. In the second place, the uncertainly was permanent, because the medical charts about my baby’s health could vary from one moment to another. To be perfectly honest I had too many questions and very few answers, and without a doubt I needed to resolve them from a much less scientific perspective and more in the human way.

I believe that it was my interest and curiosity as a mother, my professional work with children and my job as a writer what took me to think about how my husband and I could communicate with our daughter, independent of the barriers that separated us. Although I had worked with full term babies, the truth is that I didn’t have any resources to know for sure how I was supposed to interact with my daughter, given the fact that she was so premature, I opted for the shorter road: if I couldn’t hug or touch my daughter, or kiss her, or caress her, i had to do something so that she knew I was there next to her each time. While we took out of a magic hat resources that I knew and others that came to me by intuition, but always slowly, to their rhythm and mine, paradoxically improved that the progress of communication took place in enlarged steps.

This is the reason for this site really, is to make the mother feel like she can take advantage of the moments she can be with her baby. Because from the moment the baby is born, until he or she overcomes all the problems and underdeveloped issues, it is necessary to develop a great confidence in life, so that you can then transmit to your baby that the world for him is a safe place.