I didn’t get much sleep the first night in the hospital. I stayed up writing e-mails and texting back and forth with my mom who was en-route to Denver. We called my parents as soon as we found out we were headed to Denver and they immediately jumped in the car and started driving from Minnesota. They left their house before we left ours and drove through the night. This is not unusual behavior for my parents, they are always there when we need them. They even came to our house when we needed a babysitter once! But it doesn’t make it any less amazing. They were in my hospital room before noon the next day and took care of us and most importantly Logan, when we could not. They gave him the sense of normalcy and routine that I so feared would be interrupted during this whole ordeal. I cannot thank them enough and if anyone has any suggestions I’m still figuring out a way to say thank you and show our appreciation. (but no, sorry mom, we’re not moving  back to MN). I also spent a good portion of the night (and many nights), terrifying myself by reading articles and “research” provided by irreputable sources on the internet. I laughed at myself as I was doing it and I can’t help but laugh now. I knew better than to look at anything on the internet. When my patients come to my office pregnant for the first time the one thing I always tell them is do NOT google your questions or concerns. No one ever feels better after googling their medical condition. You could go online looking for information about your hangnail and leave your computer convinced you have cancer and Ebola. But here I was, digging through pages of internet garbage desperately searching for an explanation, or a miraculous story about a baby born at 26 weeks, something, anything to make me feel better. Time ticked on as I searched until it hit me. The smell of bacon. At first it was faint but it kept getting stronger. The sweet and salty scent filled my nostrils and I could almost hear it sizzling. I looked at the clock, it was 4:30 in the morning. I laughed at myself thinking I had officially lost my mind. There was no way I was really smelling bacon at 4:30 in the morning. I smiled and laid back in my crunchy hospital pillow. Hallucination or not I inhaled deeply and suddenly I had escaped this hell and was sitting at the breakfast table with my little family on a Sunday morning enjoying pancakes, orange juice, and of course, bacon.

The next morning I woke up before everyone else and had a chance to brush-up before the parade of nurses and specialists made their way in to our room. My nurse for the day came to introduce herself and update my whiteboard with her name and the names of all the specialists on-duty that day. Lastly, she updated the baby’s gestational age. Today was 26+1. The goals of the day: stay pregnant. The OB team came in and introduced themselves and we further discussed the plan. They were all friendly and informative. They answered all of our questions honestly and every day after each visit we had with them we felt more confident that we were in good hands. They reviewed the main concerns with this pregnancy: for reasons unknown the baby seemed to have stopped growing about 4 weeks ago, and there was no longer any amniotic fluid. Amniotic fluid is composed of fetal urine but all of the ultrasounds showed normal looking kidneys. This baffled everyone. Why wasn’t there fluid? Were the kidneys not working or was there possibly a problem with the placenta that was restricting growth and not allowing baby to produce enough urine? There was no way to answer that question until she was born and that might need to be sooner than later. Without amniotic fluid there was nothing cushioning the baby and preventing the umbilical cord from being compressed. The cord is the blood flow to the fetus. If the cord were to be compressed the flow of blood would stop and the baby could die. The plan was to repeat an ultrasound on Monday to see if there was any change or improvement in amniotic fluid and then continue monitoring the baby until there were signs of distress at which time the baby would need to be born. Of course if the baby was distressed during pregnancy there was no way an induction of labor would be tolerated so we now knew I would be having a c-section when the time came. For now, the baby looked fine on the monitor overnight so I was now graduating to intermittent monitoring which meant that I only had to be strapped down in bed every 4-6 hours as long as things continued to go well. When I wasn’t on the monitor I was allowed to move about the hospital freely but I needed to ride in a wheelchair. They didn’t want me walking further than the nurses station. I was however, allowed to join the other expectant, high-risk mothers in the therapy pool for one hour a day but I was not allowed to do any exercise, I was only to float and relax. My job was to relax, hydrate, float, and eat. I have to admit at this point things didn’t feel so bad. As I told my siblings later in an e-mail, “I will secretly try to appreciate the fact that my Office Space dream has come to fruition. My job is to eat protein and not move. I will try my best to meet their unruly demands.”

The next visitor was my best friend, Tracy. She had just moved to Colorado a few days earlier and wasn’t working yet so she came to help us with Logan until my parents arrived. She is amazing. She was at my side every day providing support and an ear. We have been friends since we were 13 and 14 years old so she knows everything about me. She has seen me through the best and worst times of my life, it was only fitting that she was here now. My parents joined us a few hours later and suddenly things started to feel more like home than a hospital room. Tracy joined me on my first adventure to the therapy pool and the mood continued to lighten. I didn’t bring a bathing suit so I had the privilege of sporting a flirty little hospital-issued blue, gingham number that felt like a reusable, washable tablecloth. The other girls were jealous and I won best-dressed at the pool that day. There were only three of us in the pool and it almost felt like recreation time in a prison. A man at a desk sat doing the crossword half watching over us just in case we needed anything. I joked with the other moms that he was our prison guard. We made some small talk about the hospital and then one of them started talking about the bacon smell. Oh my God! It was real! They explained that the kitchen was just below us and every morning they start making bacon at 4:30. I couldn’t believe it. Yes! I had smelled it at 4:30 too. They laughed at me. One gal said she tells the days apart by the bacon smell, on the weekends they don’t start until closer to 6. I thought it was awesome. They didn’t. They told me I would come to hate the smell of bacon too. I secretly hoped I’d be there long enough to hate it too. I tried to keep socializing with the women but it got too hard when they started talking about their pregnancy issues. I couldn’t talk about why I was there without getting choked up and I was tired of crying so I chatted with Tracy until the hour was up and the wheelchairs were lined up to take us back to our rooms. 

The rest of the day was filled with more specialist. The neonatologist came in and we had a great visit. He was kind and understanding, and he really listened to us. He told us all about the NICU and how experienced the staff was. He told us about the 24 weekers that they had delivered and how well they were doing as healthy children at home. We talked about the obstacles a baby would face at 26 weeks and he repeatedly told us it would be the lungs. Babies born before 32 weeks don’t have mature lungs. I had received my first steroid injection and I’d have another that night in order to help speed lung maturation which would greatly increase chances of survival but again, we wouldn’t know until birth. Amniotic fluid helps with lung development and maturation so it would be hard to say how developed the lungs would be at the time of delivery.

The day continued with more introductions to specialists and various staff (including the on-staff massage therapist!) and though they didn’t come with many answers. but they did provide us with hope. Everyone seemed so confident that our baby would survive. We started each introduction by explaining our professions and assuring them that discussions about death or saying the word death was not off limits. We wanted facts and we didn’t want anything sugar coated. We had honest and open discussions, and they all thought the odds were in our favor. They expected the baby to live, and encouraged us to attend a NICU parent prep course the next day. For the first time we started to believe there was a chance we would have a small but healthy baby. We started to feel like we weren’t crazy for coming to a hospital to try to save a severely premature baby. We no longer felt like we were hysterical parents grasping at straws. We were now parents who were preparing to have a tiny baby in the NICU for months, but we were going to have a baby, this baby, in our arms eventually. I started feeling more movement from the baby and I felt like it was telling me not to give up. I felt like the baby was saying that everything would be OK and things would work out. I was eagerly looking forward to Monday when we would repeat the ultrasound. I had the smallest bit of hope that the ultrasound would show an increase in fluid and maybe even some growth. I just had to make it to Monday….