PREM milk bank is 2 years old

I’m not sure if they had an offical celebration, but the PREM human milk bank at King Edward Memorial Hospital in Perth recently turned 2 years old. finisterre.minti.com

Last year they held a first birthday party and invited all the babies who had benefitted from donated milk, including my daughter Talia. It was only a small gathering, but a big event for us as Talia was only 6 weeks corrected and I vary rarely took her further than a few blocks from our house at that point.

The Perth PREM Milk bank celebrates its first year

I was aware of the milk bank’s existence before Talia was born. I must have read about it when I visited KEMH for an antenatal appointment, and I remember thinking it would be nice to be able to donate milk to help other mothers. I had no idea that I would end up on the receiving end!

My milk came in very slowly, and without the assistance of medication would never have been enough to sustain a baby. However, before the medication kicked in, Talia’s requirements, minimal though they were, outstripped my feeble supply. One afternoon I received a call from the NICU asking if we would be prefer to use formula or donor milk. We had no hesitation in accepting donor milk, knowing it is much better for babies in almost any circumstance, and particularly when the baby has an immature gut. Talia received donor milk for about a week before my own supply caught up and I was able to take over myself.

I have read articles in magazines and online where women react to the idea of giving their milk to another baby (or having their baby drink another mother’s milk) with revulsion. However I can’t imagine they would respond that way if their own baby really needed that help.

The irony is that in the not-so-distant past, it was quite common for women to share their milk, without any worries about disease (which is carefully screened out in the donor milk bank). A lady I know, now in her 60s, told me that when one of her own children was just born she had abundant supply and would go to the hospital nursery and pump - and they would use her milk to feed all the babies in the nursery!  How times have changed.

Photographing and scrapbooking your NICU experience

I love Talia’s NICU photos, looking back on them now. I wish I had more of them, and I really wish I had some video. I don’t think I realised at the time how important they would become, because when I was spending so much of every day in the nursery, I felt as though every detail would be burned into my brain forever. Unfortunately, you do start to forget the little details so every photos is precious - especially the size comparison photos, and the few of me holding Talia. Sadly I lost a lot of my hospital photos last year due to a computer failure - so be sure to create a back up of any photos you take.

I know there are mums who can hardly bear to look at their hospital photos, showing their baby looking so small and struggling to hold on to life - but it is better to have the photos and choose not to look at them, than not to have them at all. One day your child may also want to know more about how their life started and how amazingly far they have come.

The KEMH nurses were quite good at giving me little items to keep - things like hospital bands, a tiny blood pressure cuff, monitor leads, the little paper tape they use to measure head circumference and so on. They also made me a card for Mothers Day with Talia’s footprints in it, and so forth. All these precious little souvenirs are in a special memory box which I dip into from time to time.

I’m not really a scrapbooker, although I’ve done a bit of digital scrapbooking. However I know a lot of people like to create baby pages, and if you want something special, here is a site which offers stickers and other scrapbooking stuff specifically for premature babies. http://www.mykidsinspiration.com/shop/index.php
The only drawback is that they call premmies “preemies” in the US.

The photos in this post are a couple of my digital scrapbooking pages, they are part of a photo book I made of Talia’s first year. (They don’t actually use anythings specifically for prems, other than my actual photos.) You can see scrapbooking done by other premmie mums on the L’il Aussie Prems forum here.

Mothers Day

Last year was my first Mothers Day.
It felt much like any other day in the weeks before or after it - trekking in to the hospital, reading the chart to see how much Talia weighed and how much milk she’d been fed, watching the nurses take care of my baby. It was hard sometimes to even feel that she was really mine, when all I could do was change the occasional nappy, express my milk via a machine and hope for a cuddle once a day or every second day. I worried about her, I shed plenty of tears.
Taking her home and leading a normal life seemed a distant dream.

This year it is the NICU which is a dream, dimmed by time but not forgotten.
Pictures of premature babies on the news bring tears to my eyes but for us, so much has taken place, so much has changed in a year. My beautiful daughter finally allowed to go home. Breastfeeding, settling, weigh-ins. First smiles, tummy time, growing out of clothes, starting solids. Sitting, rolling, turning the pages of a book. Our first birthday celebrations.

Another Mothers’ Day.
We shared it with my mothers’ group, holding a joint first birthday party for our babies, born between March 20 (Talia’s birthday) and June 22 (the day Talia left hospital) last year. I made party food, sewed a gift and helped decorate the venue. Yes I am a real mum - I can walk the walk (while pushing a pram) and talk the talk and have the t-shirt to prove it (almost certainly with baby food smeared onto it). I still worry and I still shed tears from time to time, and maybe I always will. It seems to be part and parcel of being a mother.

Out of the humidicrib

Today marks the first anniversary of an early milestone.  We came into the nursery on a Monday evening to find the humidicrib gone, and in its place, Talia lying asleep in an open cot.  We had no idea it was imminent and were almost beside ourselves with excitement.

The nurses said she was a hot baby (she still is) and they couldn’t make the humidicrib any cooler, so out she came! She was exactly 5 weeks old and weighed somwhere between 1.4 and 1.5kg.

The last day of zero

I’ve been feeling anxious and emotional all day, and as the hours went by and it came closer to the anniversary of Talia’s birth the feeling just became stronger until here I am now, mid-evening, sitting on the sofa with a box of tissues and wiping away the tears.

This time last year I was in a shared ward with other expectant mothers. I’d had an ultrasound in the late afternoon which showed my baby’s feet clearly pressing down on my bulging, partly dilated cervix. As a result I’d been told to go immediately back to bed, keep my feet up, and not get up unless I needed to use the bathroom. My hopes of going home in a day or two were dashed, and I anticipated a long, boring period of bedrest waiting for “Tic-Tac” to grow and hopefully arrive close to her due date.

My lower abdomen was sore, and I mentioned it to every nurse who came to check on me, but each time they felt me they said it was still soft and it was nothing to worry about. I remember I was in tears that evening too, because I’d asked if they would call my mother if anything happened (like me going into labour) and they said they couldn’t guarantee it. I felt lonely and miserable. Around 11pm I felt I was unlikely to sleep with the pain in my abdomen and rang to ask for some panadol. The nurse who arrived to see what I wanted felt my stomach and immediately called for someone to take me down to a labour ward. As they wheeled me out I was begging them to call my mother.

Down in the labour ward I was in a big room by myself. I met a funky young midwife named Xena and was introduced to a handsome young surgeon whose name I forget, but in chatting we discovered we had both gone on student exchange. My labour pains were intensifying and they offered me morphine. Not knowing how long I would be in labour, and being a total wimp, I accepted it. In retrospect it was the only thing I regret, because I was a zombie for the following 24 hours.

Not knowing if the nurses had called or not, I asked Xena if she would contact my mother. However no sooner had she started to leave the room than in came mum. A nurse had called and left a message when she was asleep and didn’t answer the phone quickly enough. However the number they said to call back on was a wrong number, so mum just assumed the worst and got straight into the car and drove immediately to the hospital and buzzed security to be let in. It was around midnight. I remember holding mum’s hand really, really tightly as we waited to see what would happen.

It must have been close to 2am when the surgeon decided that it was too risky to let me continue labouring. With Talia in the footling breech position, if my waters broke her body might easily slip out leaving her head stuck, and there was a real risk of umbilical cord prolapse - which could lead to brain damage or stillbirth. I don’t recall the exact sequence of events following that, but I was moved to an operating theatre. I can recall going through a series of swinging doors, like you see at the start of medical dramas on TV. I met a couple of friendly anaesthetists. One was almost a stand-up comedian, he just had one joke after another as he supervised his more junior colleague painting my back with a cold liquid before he put in the epidural. By this stage the morphine had taken effect and I was not in so much pain, but everything felt not-quite-real, as if I was watching it all happening to somebody else. Sleep deprivation may have also been to blame.

I met up with my mother again in the operating theatre. The room seemed to be full of people - two surgeons, the midwife, the anaesthetists, three people from the NICU. I remember that I could feel nothing from the chest down, but from the chest up everything was shaking uncontrollably, as if I was cold although I don’t recall being cold. I didn’t even feel quite so frightened by that stage, just numb and vaguely annoyed that I couldn’t stop my arms from wobbling like jellies. I would have liked to actually see what they were doing but perhaps it was better not to. Mum could see some of the action reflected in the big silver light over the operating table as she held my hand again. She told me about the big blood clot which was behind the placenta, and possibly the cause of my premature labour.

I had no idea how long it would take but was still surprised at how quickly everything happened. They started at 3am. Within minutes Talia was out and being bubble-wrapped by the NICU team. It took a little longer to stitch me back up again, but even so it wasn’t long. A NICU person held a pathetic wrinkly red-faced bundle near me and I reached up to brush a finger on her forehead before they whisked her away. Mum stayed with me in recovery, but I only recall recovering long enough to finally fall asleep.

When I woke up it was morning, and the morphine was like a haze. I was in a private room, and someone had brought me a polaroid picture of my baby. I remember looking at the photo and feeling empty and slightly frightened because I didn’t feel any emotional connection, no rush of love, only blankness as if I was looking at a stranger’s baby. At the same time I felt physically empty too, because Talia had always been a wriggly baby who kicked regularly and I felt barren without the movement inside me.

The rest of the day was a blur. I recall very little, other than speaking to my stunned husband on the phone from Singapore, and my mother arriving with a bunch of striking blue orchids. In the evening I agreed for Talia to take part in a clinical trial, and someone showed me how to use a breastpump.

So much has taken place since then.

Today I made a cake, blew up balloons, got ready for the big day tomorrow. My husband is in Singapore again and it all seems a bit unreal. To celebrate the last few hours of her last day of being zero, I packed a bottle (of milk for Talia) and bought some takeaway and we sat in the park in the twilight and watched the ducks and the dog-walkers together. It was incredibly peaceful and such a beautiful contrast to the same night last year.