Today Zoey made the transition from her incubator to a regular crib. It's a positive development, of course, but seeing her in her crib made me feel somehow anxious.
For almost two and a half months, I'd become accustomed to seeing her in the incubator, and it had become one of those familiar things I'd just come to accept, so seeing her without it was like having a visual rug yanked out from under me. I'd come to consider the incubator a necessary reality to keep my daughter warm and safe.
Now she doesn't need it. That just strikes me as surreal somehow. I mean, it's great, but unsettlingly different for the time being.
Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP) remains a concern, and a final eye test on Tuesday will determine whether she'll go in for laser surgery in the next day or so following the exam. As of yesterday's exam, the doctor is relatively certain surgery will be required. So, there's that additional worry to throw on the stack of other worries that now reaches halfway between Mars and Jupiter, somewhere in the asteroid belt--which is another worry entirely, because what if an asteroid strikes my worry stack? I probably shouldn't think about that.
In the odd hours when I find time to sit in front of a computer, I manage to get some freelance writing done, but it's a broken process of jagged starts and stops, so it can be a challenge to remember what the hell I was writing about at the point of my last stop.
I also have started thinking about longer term employment options once Zoey comes home in late April. Freelance writing and editing is great when I'm on the feast end of the feast and famine freelance cycle, but I don't want to rely solely on that once the daily hospital drama is finally in the rearview mirror. Not sure what I'll find locally, but Wal-Mart greeter has a certain ring to it. There's also the option of scrawling a message on a piece of cardboard and standing on a street corner all day, which has become something of a local phenomenon that might be worth looking into.
So, you know, there are options.
Posted by Ryan at March 12, 2011 07:29 PM | TrackBack
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