Our best laid plans do oft go awry

Hello Steemit community. I am very new to this kind of thing, cryptocurrency that is. My sister and brother-in-law have been all over this and bitcoin for a long time now and introduced me to steemit.

I like to write, I love sculpting my ideas into the written language where my logic can be more succinct. Writing has given me a way to record ideas and theories that somehow seem important to memorialise, to what end I have no idea, maybe my children and grandchildren will read it one day. Amongst that I parent two little girls and do relief teaching at a local high school.

I have a blog (The best laid schemes o'mice an men), for now it's largely about parenting, since that occupies my days and nights full-time. It started as a response to some unexpected twists and turns in the plans we laid out for ourselves. I'll share a part of that story below.

Coarc...what?

For all the preparation and planning we do, so much of what happens to us is beyond our control. Having children made me realise more than ever how little control we have. After two miscarriages I figured my now healthy pregnancy meant we were past all that, bad things just didn't happen to me, life had been good so far. 

Our daughter was born in a little West Australian town in 2013, weighing a healthy 4.05kg (that's 8.9 lbs) with a strong heartbeat. We took our little girl home after five days. Proudest moment walking down the hospital halls and into the car park holding this tiny person, I was sure everyone we passed would be floored with admiration at what we had created. At home we sat on the couch and stared at her, “Now what?” I asked. We were elated and ready to start parenthood.

A few had commented that she rarely opened her eyes, but I was defensive. I was like a snarling she-wolf at this point so it's no wonder people walked on egg-shells watching what they said. But by day 7 her jaundice hadn’t subsided and was getting worse and so were my baby blues. I went from barred teeth to sobbing uncontrollably. I'm annoyingly stubborn, I don’t like to appear weak or incapable. But this newborn thing was overwhelming and something else was wrong...I could feel it, like a twisting inside me that I didn't understand.

Soon she wasn’t waking to feed and she did sleep...all the time. I had no idea what newborns were supposed to be like so I tried not to worry. until day 12 when my mum found me in a state of frenzy. Curly hadn’t fed for over 6 hours. We tried expressing milk and feeding it to her with a syringe, but she wouldn’t wake up. I was fragile, I didn’t want to be the manic, paranoid newbie mum, until my own mother said, “take her to the doctor, something’s not right.” 

We were sent straight to emergency where our little girl woke up to bright lights and people crowding around, this was enough stimulation to have her feeding for a good 20 minutes. The emergency doctor saw her feeding and stated, "I've delivered thousands of babies, and that is not a sick baby." I should have been reassured, but I wasn't, the nagging sense that something was wrong wouldn't go away. They kept us in overnight. We were left in a room where the midwife informed me I should sleep and she would come in around the next feed to see how things are. This put my mind at ease and I slept, and slept. 7 hours later waking in a panic, no one had come in to wake us.  Overnight a woman had gone into labour at 27 weeks, and we had been forgotten. 

When my doctor arrived the next day to check on us she phoned Princess Margaret Hospital in Perth, they requested we be flown up straight away as a precaution and given antibiotics, our country hospital didn’t have the facilities or expertise. I remember the flight, but I was unable to sit next to her, I could only hear the crying occasionally over the sound of the engine. Feeling utterly helpless I just grit my teeth and tried to zone out. When we landed at the airport there was no ambulance ready for us, we had to wait, and Curly continued to scream and fight. I broke down in the toilet there and demanded they let me at least hold her, to try and comfort her, even with all the wires and oxygen attached. In my frenzied state I was sure she just wanted her mum, that she would stop crying if they let me hold her and feed her. It was freezing cold and the loneliest wait. When the ambulance finally came we were given a priority 1 authorisation, with traffic at a standstill due to a football game. The ambulance flew down the outer edges of the freeway making record time and arriving with our hearts in our mouths. Our daughter was rushed up to the NICU [Neonate Intensive Care Unit] where a team of doctors and nurses hooked her up to some incredible looking machines. I still wasn't able to hold her.

Within a few hours the Cardiologist came to see us and explained what was wrong. Our baby had a ‘Coarctation of the Aorta’ or a narrowing in the aorta, except that hers wasn't just narrow it was almost closed. Immediately they needed to insert a stent through her femoral artery so blood could flow through her aorta. We were floored, things like this didn't happen to us.  I’ll never forget the moment we were allowed back in to the NICU to see her once the procedure had finished. Such a tiny little thing with tubes and wires attached everywhere, in her neck, arms, nose, feet. And yet I felt reassured, the machines were helping her to breath, giving her fluids, she wasn’t in any pain and finally, she could get some rest. So did we.

When the surgical 'fix' came a few weeks later it was what we had been waiting for all along, but I still wasn’t prepared for the moment I kissed her goodbye and the anaesthetist wheeled her away. It was a three hour wait, I couldn’t speak the entire time…every risk and complication the surgeon had laid out for us kept trying to push it’s way into my thinking. 

It was a success.

Since the ordeal she’s had one balloon angioplasty to stretch out some scar tissue, but otherwise our daughter has met every milestone. As time moved on it's become a blip in our timeline and hers, if I dwell for too long on the events I feel sad. But we were the lucky ones, and there's so much to be grateful for now.

So that's my story for now. I hope I can entertain with some more light-hearted posts soon!