CICU Day 17

a small work of nonfiction

sippakorn yamkasikorn

For querying, this week has been slow. One form rejection and that’s it.

It’s been a nice break. I’ve felt more inspired with my writing and more present in general. Querying is so hard on my mental health.

***After I wrote that and scheduled this post I got news, that I’m still processing. I’ll share more about that next week.

This week, I thought I’d share a short story.

This is a small work of nonfiction. I want to preface this by saying my daughter has had heart surgery since the night I write about. She’s 4 and ½ and is doing AMAZING! This is an honest snapshot of our time in the CICU, if you’ve spent any time in medical facilities with loved ones it might be triggering.

CICU Day 17

My baby’s nurse rushes in and out of the small antiseptic room, bringing with her the scent of flowers. This hospital doesn't allow nurses to wear perfume; maybe it's her shampoo, or maybe she's a rule breaker. Her purple crocs soundlessly move back and forth from the monitors in our room to her perch just outside it. There’s a window separating the two and she never takes her eyes off of us—off of her.

The beeping is insistent. A constant reminder that the vinyl rocking chair we sit in is not at home. We are not home. Other than the steady beep beep beep, everything is silent. There are eight other babies on this floor right now and not one is crying.

My little girl is nestled in to me. She is nursing slowly, quietly. Trying to get more comfortable, I readjust, but it’s impossible. She has wires on her forehead, her chest, and her legs—all attached to the monitors. I know the wires are keeping her safe. They are the vines keeping us attached to the tree of life, but they make it hard to get cozy. Hard to feel completely close.

The nurse comes in again. My heart is beating fast, but not as fast as my little girl’s.

“Should I put her back?” I ask, looking at the small ‘bed.’ It looks like an incubator without a wall, the clear plastic only going part way up. I don’t want to put her back, but I don’t know what to do. Nursing takes energy, precious energy her heart might not be able to give.

“No, the closeness is good for her. It keeps her calm,” the nurse replies, getting a squirt of sanitizer on her way out, the sound echoing through the quiet halls.

Calm.

I wish I could say the same for myself. I wriggle enough to pull out my phone. The clock reads 2:36 am. I start to text my husband. He needed to sleep at home tonight, but I drop my phone into the crack of the rocking chair. Forcing my hand between the arm of the chair and the seat, I try to reach it, but there’s no way with all the wires tethering us to the bed.

I focus on my little girl’s face—her rosebud lips tucked into my breast. Her little hand is holding one of the cords. At just over two weeks old, she has a full head of dark hair. All the nurses comment on it.

“Wow, look at all that hair.”

If my husband isn’t there, they ask, “Where’d she get that dark hair?”

Towards the end of my pregnancy when I was getting ultrasounds every other week, I could see it floating in the amniotic fluid.

They found her heart condition when I was twenty weeks pregnant. We knew that as soon as she was born, she would need to go to the Children’s Hospital, more specifically to the cardiac intensive care unit. I spent the first thirty hours of my baby's life a few miles away. After a lot of walking and hiding my grimaces, the hospital I was in recovering from my c-section released me so I could be with my little girl. I got to hold her for the first time two days after she was born and my whole body heaved a sigh of relief. It felt like being reunited with an essential part of myself. But it wasn’t completely what I had imagined. In my mind, when I thought of holding her, there were no wires, no insistent beeping.

At first, things were better than the doctors expected. She started eating on her own. Her blood pressure was looking better. She was doing so well they took her off oxygen. My little girl has cardiomyopathy. The right side of her heart is too large and doesn’t function properly. She literally has a big heart and tonight it’s killing her.

There’s two nurses in the room now. They flit about the monitors like hummingbirds to a feeder. She’s fallen asleep. I pry her little lips off my nipple just how the lactation consultant showed me and readjust my shirt. My baby’s nurse kneels by the rocking chair. “The doctor will be here in just a few minutes, but they might bring in some equipment before that. I don’t want you to be alarmed, it’s just big tanks. Like the ones that were in here before.”

I nod and swallow back tears. We were supposed to move to the less critical wing of the hospital tomorrow, if she did well without the oxygen. A few days after that, we were supposed to go home. I watch the dream of nursing at home surrounded by soft fabric and curtained windows dissipate as a man wheels in a massive green metal tank.

The clang of the tank on the dolly wakes my baby up. She lets out a shrill cry and roots around for my nipple. I adjust my clothes again and she calms as she suckles slowly.

The heart failure doctor comes in and as he talks to me, one nurse takes her blood pressure, while the other puts stickers on her small cheeks.

“We’re putting her back on oxygen and nitric oxide. Her heart is struggling. Both sides of her heart are now showing depressed function, not just the right. This should help,” the doctor assures me as he tries to avert his gaze from the nursing. You would think he would be more used to it, but one nurse told me they mostly get older children in this wing.

The cannula goes in and my baby squirms against me in an effort to get away. She hates the little plastic piece that goes up her nose and blows life saving air. I know when she has more energy she will pull it out with her tiny fingers, taking the cheeks stickers off with it, but for now, she settles and falls asleep. The doctor leaves. All the nurses have retreated to their perch, giving us an illusion of privacy.

I kiss my little girl on the head, place her sleeping body in the small bed, and watch the rise and fall of her chest. Before getting into bed, I make one more attempt to get my phone, and I see it has fallen all the way through the chair to the floor. I pull up the text thread with my husband, but I don’t know what to say. How do you describe absolute terror over a text, and then quickly say it’s all fine now, for now? Instead, I plug the phone in and crawl into bed.