As if it wasn’t enough to go through 36 hours of labour, 16 hours of pushing, and have a full-on mechanical intervention hospital birth. Right after birth, my baby was grabbed by a team of strangers, stripped from the warmth of my belly, and rushed off to the intensive care unit (ICU), with no proper explanation offered. I was deeply distraught and quickly urged the midwife to get my sister to follow the baby, since I was bleeding and immobile on the operating table.
After being stitched up, I was wheeled back into my room, where a nurse gave a me a polaroid photo of my baby lying in the ICU, wires coming in and out. It felt like a sick joke. I’d just given birth to an amazing creature and all I had to show for it was this freaky photo.
God knows how I did it, but I struggled to the ICU in my wheelchair, too weak to walk and desperate to be near my baby, only to find him sprawled out on in a special isolated area on the “observation deck” - a secure plastic unit with more monitors and machines than you can shake a stick at. It was horrifying. The nurse on duty was a bitch from hell, who wouldn’t let me touch my baby, never mind hold him. She let me know that SHE was in control of MY baby now, and all contact would have to go through her.
I have never felt so powerless in all my life. I wanted to slap her and snatch up my baby and walk out of that hospital hell hole right there and then, but unfortunately my legs weren’t working and all I could do was look at my baby and cry. Various nurses nodded sagely and murmured something about my hormones.
Some pediatrician (also from hell) came into the room and told me that my baby was in critical condition, but wouldn’t tell me why. He said that my baby had displayed “concerning behaviours”. Well, yeah, right, duh. Wouldn’t you, if you had been stripped from your mamas womb, and laid out flat on an observation deck, stuck with an IV and plastered with monitors, bright lights, loud sounds and strangers all around?! No smiling, loving mama touching you, reassuring you, offering a warm breast to suckle and big soft arms to cuddle you. Everytime I looked at my baby, he was eyes wide open, legs and arms splayed apart, full-on startle response. I tried to tell him it would all be OK, that I loved him and would get him out of there, but I wasn’t very convincing.
The bad guy told me my baby needed a CT scan and an ultrasound, and I would have to leave. I was ushered out of the room and told to “rest” so that baby could get proper care. Whatever!!!
It crossed my mind once or twice that these people in the baby ICU were just over the moon that my baby was in there, because it gave them something to get their teeth into. The staff were drama demons, I swear to God it’s true.
My sister was there the whole time as my fearless, fearsome advocate. She was angry and assertive, and kept saying “THAT BABY NEEDS TO BE WITH ITS MOTHER!”. We were making a big scene, me sobbing hysterically, and my sister frothing at the mouth with fury at the injustice of it all. The big cheese pediatrician bossman came into the ICU and we had to have a special meeting, where we were told that the CT scan showed my baby had intra-ventricular hemorrhaging (blood in the brain) but that the good news was that this was only Grade 1, and very common, unlikely to cause any problems. The ultrasound showed nothing.
So what was the problem? Why was my baby still in the ICU wired up on countless monitors and being administered hourly doses of Tylenol through an IV?! NO response. Just a bunch of babble about “concerning behaviours”. I quietly asked if I could take my baby home now, and was told that they needed to keep him in for a couple more days while a specialist doctor from San Francisco came over to do some more tests and make a more “accurate” diagnosis. What a bunch of B.S.
I looked the top doctor straight in the eye and said ”if I want to pick up my baby RIGHT NOW and take him home with me, can you legally prevent me from doing so?”. At this point, there was a stunned silence, and then all hell broke loose as the pediatrician from hell went bright red in the face and practically shouted that I could kill my baby if I did this, that he was at great risk from seizures, and that he could DIE if he did not get the proper treatment. The other big boss pediatrician calmly said that if I tried to take my baby, they would get a court order against me, and come and take my baby back into the ICU. Another bunch of B.S., although they did manage to scare me into submission at the time, so I guess their tactics work.
My midwife, who sees a lot of this sort thing, had already warned me that once I got into the hospital system, it would be very difficult to escape. She also told me that they have no legal power and that I could take my baby out at any time I wanted. But even though I knew that, I just didn’t have the strength to fight those bastards.
Then, on our next visit to see my baby the good doc from the operating table, Charles ( I love that name!) came in on his day off to see how me and the baby were doing OK. What a good doc! I sobbed on his shoulder and told him it was awful, that they wouldn’t let me hold the baby, and I felt powerless and the people that worked in the ICU were control freak bitches. To my surprise he agreed, and gave me the best advice (what a wise doc!). He said I had to “find my angels in there,” people that would work to help me. And he told me the best strategy would be to stay in the ICU all the time, to make a nuisance of myself by refusing to leave, and that this way everyone would get sick of me, and then they would do everything they could to get me and my baby out of there.
From then on everything shifted, from the dark into light.
