Nurses, Doctors and Babies - Oh My!

In addition to all of the fun, the last few weeks have been filled with a slew of doc appointments and meetings. Since being designated as 'high risk' at 20 weeks I've been averaging an appointment a week, but that will soon be getting bumped up to 3 times a week so I've never been more grateful to have a flexible schedule working from home. First up, Mark and I headed to Children's Hospital to meet with the surgeon who will perform the surgery the day or day after she's born. Understandably, he couldn't give us anything solid by way of details since he won't really know what he's dealing with until she comes out. But he was nice and based on the amount of fancy looking docs in the wall frames it looks like this guy is pretty legit, so we left feeling like we were in good hands.

Yesterday we met with another team of doctors at the hospital where we'll be delivering and to take a tour of the level three NICU (legit!) where she'll be before and after surgery. They were very nice and thorough about explaining everything they could and answering all of our questions, but the moral of the story is there are no guarantees until they can actually see her.  But, it was very reassuring that they are aware of our concerns and want exactly what we want - for us to be able to hold and feed her as soon as possible, although they explained that half of these babies have other problems that can't be detected in the ultra sound  and can be very serious so their first priority will to make sure she is stable.  We've learned that although this isn't the way we had pictured everything going down, we need to be flexible and do whatever it takes to make sure she is healthy and makes it through all of this with flying colors. It wasn't easy coming face to face with the reality of what she'll have to go through in a short couple of weeks, but they tried to gently prepare us for things that we are going to see and what we'll be able/not able to do.  The estimate of how long we'll be there is officially a vague 'weeks or months' but they were able to say that best case scenario would be two weeks at a bare minimum which at least helps up to come up with a couple different plans of what to do and where to stay. Since our experience with NICU's is zilch, I'm not sure if this is the standard or if its due to the heightened level of cases here, but they only allow two people in at a time, and one of those two people has to be Mark or I, and that they'll probably call in the SWAT team if you have even a hint of a cold.  With all of these restrictions I like to think of it as the exclusive 'VIP room'.

So for now, we're trying not to worry too much and just take things as they come.  We really are lucky that the doctors and nurses have pretty much seen it all and really have her best interest (and our best interest) in mind at all times and really want the same things we want.  They said she'll be 'running the show' and we'll all just take her lead, something we might as well get a crash course in now since that's probably going to be the case for the next 18 years anyways. The good news is is that, granted everything goes well, even though it will be a bit of a rough start she should have no issues going forward and will be as normal as you could expect for a child coming from the two of us.