As I sit with a post-jaundiced baby in my lap, swaddled in a biliblanket (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biliblanket) that makes him look like a newborn Emperor Palpatine, the last 48 hours come over me in tsunami surges.
2 days old, we took him in for a checkup at our birth center. All seemed well. Yes, he was passed out harder than a frat boy on a Friday night, but he’s a newborn, that’s what they do, right? When they drew his blood with a prick on the foot, he didn’t even react. What a champ, we thought. Then we got a call at 9 pm. “‘Something, something , something, jaundice,” said the midwife. That was all I heard. And then our options: we either had to get him to the hospital or get a biliblanket delivered ASAPish.
Apparently, there’s a boutique service for every obscure baby issue. I won’t bore you with the details of the placenta encapsulation we got (and the images seared on my corneas of the midwife holding up the placenta and showing us the complete anatomy in all its gory, alien-escaping-from-your-chest-cavity details). But what we did find was that there is a service that will have a biliblanket delivered by a courier right to your house. In 2 hours, we had the biliblanket and were delivering phototherapy to our tiny baby with a case of the yellows.
We thought we had this jaundice nipped in the bud. After a rough night of sleep, I was even singing “Baby’s Got His First Disease” (awaiting release on my upcoming album), and thinking we were on our way to recovery. When we went in for our first visit to his pediatrician, they had us registered at Children’s Hospital before we even left the office.
Then it was a Fast and Furious drive to the hospital with Vin Diesel played by yours truly. If I had known that it would be another hour and a half until we actually got admitted into the NICU after the beautiful bureaucratic process of the medical field, I might have driven a little less aggressive.
On the elevator ride up to the 4th floor, people were cooing and swooning over our Baby Yoda. One woman told us how beautiful Ryder was and congratulated us. “Yeah, we really don’t want to be here,” Hannah said, and made that lady think twice before she complimented anyone’s baby again!
Enter the NICU, maybe the saddest place in the entire hospital. If we thought we were overwhelmed before seeing the visitors at Children’s carrying flowers and get well soon balloons, the women dressed up as Elsa and Anna bringing Disney cheer to all the sick children, and the little girl with no hair pushing her IV drip, medication and half dozen other fluids around with her, well, we didn’t know anything yet.
It was a nauseous whirlwind we trudged through once they brought us to our room. We learned about the blah-blah of the bilirubin and the commonality of jaundice in infants. We watched our son get poked and farmed for blood, then they put several monitors on him to measure heart rate, oxygen levels and breathing rate. They flipped and twisted him, measured and prodded, probed and diagnosed. I had been living in a semi-surreal existence already, not believing that a human being so small and fragile could be in my keep, but watching him be handled and placed in plastic arms, bathed in blue light and his every inner working measured in sharp peaks and broken valleys—well—it made the reality of parenthood all hit home like a punch from Mike Tyson (circa 1993, before the ear bite).
We took in all the talks on jaundice and the baby’s inability to process red blood cells with a still-developing liver. We sat stoically through the doctor’s prognosis and prediction of 1-3 day stay in the NICU. We had consultations with a lactation specialist, social worker, nurses and pediatricians. We were shown the family lounge and directed to the cafeteria. We were told that everything would be all right and it was not our fault. It all flooded over us until we were drowning in fear and helplessness.
I know the nurses and doctors were just doing their job. And a great and difficult and thankless job they were doing. Major kudos to every employee in the NICU. But in our state of mind, every latex-gloved touch was an assault and the monitor display may as well have been a timebomb countdown. Our boy was 3 days old. All we wanted was to hold him non-stop, skin to skin and wash him in a love and care so warm and ever-flowing that he would never fear or fret for anything. Instead, he was inches from us, but marooned on a cold, blue island that felt oceans apart.
Even though it was terrible and traumatizing for all parties, the day wasn’t so unbearable. We were admitted into our room around 1 or 2 pm. We adjusted to a pattern of sleep and phototherapy, waking and breastfeeding and supplementing with donor milk, then soothing and returning to sleep. I even took a quick drive back home to pick up some pajamas and other essentials. But just when we thought we were settling into a semi-serviceable night of sleep, that was almost like a hotel if you looked at it right, the night quickly turned into a sleepless nightmare.
We fed him and got him down around 11. The nightshift nurses helped us get comfortable for our overnight stay. We didn’t think it would be a night at the Ritz but we never imagined it could be a non-stop suffer-fest punctuated by alarming alarms and unceasing newborn screams. Every time we fed him or soothed him and got him to relax into a fitful rest (which we could watch on the bright display connected to his heart and lungs), he would relax just long enough for us to think we might actually fall asleep and then we would be awoken to a shrill cry that cut straight to the roots of our teeth.
From about 11 pm to 4 am, we took turns doing what we could. But with each cycle we might get 10-15 minutes rest and then have to jump into rescue roles. And as the night went on, the intervals got shorter and shorter. Soon I was breaking down (I’m a pretty broken person when I lose sleep (link)), and moaning to a human who has been on this earth for 72 to hours that he should just got to sleep. I got sad and angry and shattered and hopeless. Those 5 hours felt like the entirety of my existence in fatherhood. And I was failing. And through it all I had been watching my wife, the source and shelter of this baby, splinter and reform over and over again through this process. To say nothing of the 48 hour labor and natural, unmedicated birth I had been a powerless witness to just days before. It was more than I thought I could bare. If this is parenthood, I thought, I don’t stand a chance.
Finally, after I had melted down to the point that Hannah had to (figuratively) verbally slap me in the face and tell me to get myself together, I went to the nurses and begged them to do as we had requested earlier. We got them to keep Ryder in the biliblanket and let Hannah, in a waterproof recliner, hold him and nurse him to sleep with the lights shining on them both. It was still a fitful and uncomfortable rest, but the screams were more raspy whimpers and we got maybe an hour of sleep.
Morning came and I went to go get us decaf coffees (we stopped drinking caffeine (link)) and I got Hannah a special breakfast of dairy-free banana peanut butter fudge ice cream. We felt like steaming piles of meconium (link) but at least the night was over. Then in our delirious mind state we sat through another onslaught of tests and measurements, new and old information and a half dozen visits from new nurses, doctors with a team of interns, specialists and infant experts.
But, finally, we got the bilirubin tests back and we were in the clear. We could go home that day and wouldn’t have to stay another night. We were beyond ecstatic. Hannah and I were pinpricks away from signing our names in blood and entering a suicide pact if we had to stay another night. Thankfully it didn’t have to come to that.
When we finally walked out of the hospital we felt like hostages being rescued and seeing light for the first time in weeks. Well, we said, that was terrible. Let’s never do that again.
But we were only there for 24 hours. What about Dominic, across the hall, who had been there for 8 months wearing feeding tubes and oxygen like a second skin. And the baby half the size of Ryder (that’s 3 lbs.) under the incubator. And the moms and dads with their kids who lived in the NICU like it was their second home, or maybe their only home. What about my friends who had a miracle baby born at 27 weeks? They spent months in the NICU, touch and go, each day an unknown.
it makes you grateful just to have a baby with two hands and two feet. Hey, even if all the limbs and digits weren’t present, as long as the overall health is there. Just to have a living baby born is a miracle. Just getting them through the first week of life is like creating a magnum opus. Getting them through the first month, the first year, the first startling erection, the first time he paints the walls in his own poop… It’s all a pretty much moving mountains and directing the orbit of the sun and moon. it’s all just raising a kid. Hope I’m up for it.
And, on the bright side, one of my favorite hobbies to create nicknames for my family. Hannah has about 30, I’m trying to get up to 100. And now Ryder has a couple new nicknames/alter egos: Billy Rubin (he’s kind of a douche bag), and John Dice (He’s a gambler with an alcohol problem).
Well, John and Billy, we hope to never see you again. And even though we kind of hate you, there’s a lesson to be learned in everything. Just don’t ever invite John Dice into your home because he’ll probably call Billy Rubin and they’ll drink all your good beers and keep your baby awake all night. And if you don’t get rid of them quickly, they’ll take your baby over to Nic U’s, and send him on a bender.