Fast Forward

Well that was the busiest, scariest, most intense year and a half that I’ve ever experienced and the adventure is still just starting.

Although I posted for such a short time, I miss the bogging community, and I miss the outlet that this blog provided. I’ve been (mostly) quietly reading other blogs for a few months now and find myself with a lot to say about another issue, but what to do?? Should I resume this blog that I abandoned when life got to be too much or just start anew? The answer was pretty simple – it was this situation that drew me to the blogging community – this is who I am.

So now to catch up…I’m going to give the Cliff Notes version for now to keep this from turning into a novel. I’m still working through a lot of my feelings from the past year and I’m sure I’ll expound on this in future posts. If you’re curious and have questions, or especially if you are a parent of a premature child and would like more info please feel free to ask.

When we left off, Cassie was just getting ready to leave the hospital that had served as her surrogate womb (and as her parent’s security blanket) for the past few months and was about to make her grand entrance into the “real” world.

We had a few false starts, some feeding issues to work through – the whole remembering to breathe and keeping your heart beating while eating thing kind of had her stumped for a while – but she was finally released in mid-April with supplemental oxygen as needed and a pulse-ox monitor.

We had a fairly uneventful first week and then landed in PICU after a very scary A+B episode. It was only an overnight visit and we left with a new RX for reflux.

Insert a few months of sleepless nights, a never-ending regimen of specialist appts (at least two a week), me getting back to work, and suddenly we’re in July of last year. Just deleted a big long explanation, instead I’ll insert this public service announcement:

• If you are having severe chest pain and sweating up a storm, taking Maalox and yelling at everyone that it’s just heartburn is probably NOT going to make the heart attack you are in the middle of go away!

I owe my life to a wonderful friend who didn’t listen to me and forced me to let her take me to the hospital...

Follow-up with another month and a half out of work, a few more months of catching up, more specialists (for me and Cassie), my children and husband trying to come to terms with the trauma of Cassie’s birth and almost losing their mother twice, all of us coming to terms with our new normal and here we are in the present.

Whew! That was a LOT of drama in such a short space and there is so much left out…

The good news is we’re FINE, but fine means something new to us now…life is changed and it has brought and will bring new challenges and frustrations…we are changed…

But life has also brought and will bring new beauty and love and joy…

In trying to put this in words, the recent hurricanes our neighbors in the Gulf Coast are facing come to mind.

We’ve been through a huge storm and it has left destruction and devastation, it has left us open and exposed and raw, but it has also left beauty and a sense of awe. We are in the process of rebuilding, but are left with a clean slate to build on. We are saddened by the loss of our false sense of security and at the same time we are exhilarated by the freedom we now have and excited by all of the possibilities in front of us…

So what started as a way to keep friends and family updated and a way to reach out for more information on prematurity will become …what? I’m not really sure yet...but here I am inviting the whole internet along for the ride. Prematurity and its lasting effects will be a large part of it, there will certainly be venting and opinions and a little snark because well hey it is me writing, and I’m hoping that it will also be a record of this journey that we are on, a place to work through the questions and the feelings and the overwhelmingness of it all (yes, I know that’s not a word – cut a girl some slack when she’s emoting to the world at large would ya?)