Let’s start with some stats…..Baby SJ born 6.19am on 17th October 2014, weighing in at a slender 865g (that’s 1.9 pounds for any American or UKIP readers). I wonder if SJ will understand any of my humour when she’s old enough to read this?! Anyway on with the stats… seemingly every day in the warmth of the wombe counts at this stage and SJ was born at 26 weeks and 1 day, rather sooner than the 40 or so weeks that we thought she’d checked in for.
It’s around 6.45am and Roz is busy chatting to a midwife and doctor about giving up her placenta which seems far less anxious to leave her body than SJ was, meanwhile I’m allowed over to the corner of the room where she’s being worked on to see her properly for the first time. I say properly but given that she’s not much bigger than a tv remote control, been put into a plastic bag much like those ones you can roast a whole chicken in, already has varoius tubes going in and coming out of her and has 3 doctors and nurses working on her simultaneously, my view of her isn’t exactly a front row ticket.
Now this next bit may well be the most shocking revelation thus far, particularly to those of you who know me well. Not only did the sight of her leave me utterly speechless (even when the doc said I should speak to her as she can hear) all I could manage to utter was a meagre “hello sj”. And then I felt my eyes welling up. Yep, it’s true Mr Tin Man Hurst seemingly does have a heart and tear ducts to proove it.
Enough of the emotional stuff…back to SJ and her first day in the world. With Roz busying herself with this troublesome placenta, I was ushered off with the baby doctors wheeling SJ to the neonatal intensive care unit. Parked on a stool watching from across the room, I sat their transfixed as the docs set to work installing SJ into her new manmade womb to sit out the rest of her gestation. Last time I saw an incubator and paid it any attention would have been as a kid watching the annual blue peter appeals to raise the many many thousands of pounds needed to buy just one of these elaborate contraptions. Now I’m sat in a room with 4 of them, along with more monitors and hardware than your average trading floor. No sooner am I getting comfortable, I’m ushered out again so the doctors can concentrate on putting yet more lines into her teeny little body.
Back to the delivery room to see how our other heroine of the story is getting on. Still no joy with the pesky placenta (pp) it seems, despite the numerous people who have now tried all of their best tricks to coax it out. So the plan is to take Roz to theatre to have aforementioned pp manuallu removed.
So with Roz tied up in theatre and SJ busy being wired up, here I am at St George’s on my tod and still trying to figure out what’s what and what to do with myself. And so the day goes by with me running between visiting SJ in ICU and Roz in recovery and then the ward. With Roz’s anesthetic slowly wearing off and her legs starting to wriggle again, we spend much of the afternoon negotiating safe passage for Roz to go and see SJ for the first time. Finally around 5pm, nearly 11 hours since she was born, I wheel Roz into ICU to meet her daughter for the first time.
At some point during the day we’d spoken to the consultant and been given a brief overview of SJ’s condition, some of the likely issues she’d be facing and varoius other bits of info. The long and short of it was that the biggest concern right now was her under developed lungs, hence the breathing tube down her throat. The other big threat would be the risk of infection as she’s not yet got much of an immune system. There’s also the chance of hemerages on her brain so scans would be done to look out for these. But these are just the very edited highlights it seems and there are 1001 other possible problems which the consultant tells us is his job to worry about and that we’ll deal with each of them as they’re thrown at us. In short, it’s going to be a long journey or perhaps better described as a roller coaster with ups and downs being an inevitability. Oh and just to confirm, if all goes well, we can expect SJ to be spending the next 3 months at St George’s until she reaches full term….her penance for jumping the gun and making a break for freedom before we’d finished reading the baby books or even started the NCT classes (which Mrs H has already begub wondering if we’ll be getting a refund on!).
As day 1 draws to an end, I leave Roz to get some kip in the ward, SJ to settle into her new home and I head home on my own for the dinner kindly left in the fridge for me by my mum before she headed home. Sitting there eating dinner, pinging emails and texts to people and utterly exhausted, I can’t stop looking ar pictures on my phone of the teeniest little thing and smiling. So this is what it feels like to be a proud father. ..sign me up to that all day long.