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.
Zoey has been cleared for two rounds of Kangaroo Care a day, which means both my wife and I can hold her. I held her for 1.5 hours tonight. She's getting bigger by the minute; today she cleared 3.5 lbs. Tomorrow she'll be placed in a crib instead of her incubator. Things are happening fast. At this rate, she'll drive herself home come April.
I always thought the couch in the visitor waiting room looked impossibly uncomfortable, but I'll be damned if I didn't just sleep on that thing for over two hours.
We're waiting for eye doctors to come in and determine whether Zoey needs surgery for ROP, but we've learned eye doctors are notoriously non-punctual when it comes to visiting the NICU.
The hospital just called. Apparently, Zoey spent the whole night and morning removing her CPAP, so they're switching to a forced air cannula because they're tired of putting the damned CPAP back in her nose. The girl doesn't like crap up her nose, which is good, because it nips the whole cocaine use thing in the bud before she's even out of her incubator.
One thing that continues to amaze me about the NICU is the number of full term babies who require care. When I first starting coming into the NICU, I just assumed most of the babies were preemies like Zoey and Finn, but it's astonishing how many actually had perfectly "normal" gestation and delivery yet still require NICU assistance.
It's just weird to hear Zoey referred to as one of the healthier babies in the room when she's still two or three pounds smaller than the next smallest infant. The NICU is an entirely different world to experience and learn about.
To say a four month preemie vigil can strain a marriage is like saying a close proximity nuclear explosion can irritate the skin. Regardless, my wife and I have managed to keep things together without resorting to the type of hand-to-hand melee that, if recorded, would typically go viral on YouTube.
Rather, our primary coping method so far has been a heavy reliance on bickering. There is no topic too mundane that's beyond our capacity to bicker endlessly about.
We've had bicker-fests regarding laundry, groceries, television shows, snacks, the time of day, bathroom time and countless other categories that we would otherwise never have bothered to argue about. Perpetual stress and an ongoing lack of sleep, however, has resulted in every topic under the sun being fair game for a good round of bickering.
I became acutely aware of our enhanced bickering while we had our 2010 taxes prepared recently. For a brief moment, while our tax preparer asked us several questions, I found myself sort of hovering outside my body, watching as my wife and I answered the questions through an incessent barrage of back-and-forth bickering.
Q: How much did you pay for electricity last year?
A: ME: About $1,200, I guess. WIFE: Oh, it was way more than that! ME: No, it wasn't. WIFE: It had to be about $2,000. ME: Hey, I paid the damned thing all year, so I should know. WIFE: You don't remember anything! ME: Well, I certainly don't remember why I married you! WIFE: That makes two of us!
Bear in mind, the tax preparing session lasted over an hour, so you can begin to appreciate what we put our tax preparer through. Suffice it to say, she earned her service fee that day.
For whatever reason, our bickering machine gun method seems to work, although we take care not to engage in serious bickering when our toddler is present--that's when we bicker via hand gestures and facial contortions.
At the end of the day--all bickering aside--we manage to keep the household running, while finding time each day for both of us to sit with Zoey. It's a challenging juggling act even under the best of circumstances.
Daily bickering has kept us sane, as crazy as that may seem.
