NICU

Diyanna hadn’t had fed properly since she was born. This made her lose some of her birth weight and caused her to have very low blood sugar levels. This in turn also made it hard for her to regulate her body temperature. To help her, the on call doctors at the Neonatal Unit put her inside an incubator with a gavage tube (feeding tube) through her nose.

I avoided going down to see her at first. I knew if I went down to the NeoNates I wouldn’t want to leave her and that I would be unable to control the emotions that was building inside of me. But my sister in law convinced me to go down to see Diyanna together. Watching her inside the incubator and being hooked up on to various monitoring equipment was heart breaking. This was not how I imagined motherhood to be.

As parents of a newborn who was in the NICU, we were allowed to visit her at anytime during the day or night but we were not allowed to stay with her continuously. Leaving her there alone was extremely painful. I was shaking, crying and praying all the same time. I felt like I was abandoning her, that I was failing her as a mother.

Even as my emotions raged on, Dinesh and his sister stood next to me straight faced trying hard to be strong. They also had the hard task of calming me down and taking me back up to the ward. Back in the ward we tried to reason out what was happening. Trying our best not to over think of the situation and to keep positive thoughts of taking Diyanna home and doing things that a normal family would. It was only three days since I held her in my arms for the first time but being in the ward without her was strange. It was like a part of me was missing.

Towards the late evening I finally started lactating but I didn’t have Diyanna with me. A nurse helped me manually expressed what ever milk I had and sent it down to NICU so that it can be given to Diyanna, as she was being fed through the tube every 4 hours.

As it was the weekend and the on call doctor decided to repeat the test for Jaundice and to run a full blood test. We would have to wait till Monday for the head doctors and specialists to come in to observe her.

On Sunday morning I was told that the hospital couldn’t let me stay anymore as Diyanna had been moved to the Neonatal unit. I had to leave Diyanna in hospital and come home without her. The 15 minute drive felt like an hour. It was as if a black hole had swallowed all the happiness, dreams and hope from our world. It would take us 2 and a half years to start making dreams, to have hope and to be happy again.