The first night in the hospital is somewhat of a blur to me. We arrived around 11 PM after a three hour drive from home. I was tired and scared. Logan was finally asleep so I left him and Travis in the car while I figured out where we needed to go. I had to check in at the Emergency Department because the front doors of the hospital were locked and no one seemed to understand why I was there. I explained to the security guard that I was a direct admit to the OB floor. His first words were, “congratulations,” I feigned a smile. “Are you in labor?” He asked. I wanted to ask him if I looked like a woman in labor but I bit my tongue and explained to him again that I needed to be admitted. A nurse came to get me and rudely asked again if I was in labor and when I said I wasn’t she wasn’t kind as she told me that I didn’t need the Emergency Department, I needed to go upstairs. I wanted to scream in her face that I knew I needed to go upstairs but since the front doors were locked I had to come this way, but seeing as how she was the one person standing between me and a bed I silently nodded. She called one of the techs to bring me upstairs. He came with a wheelchair and he too offered his wishes of congratulations as he invited me to sit. I told him I’d been in a car for three hours and preferred to walk. He explained that it was hospital policy that I ride in a wheelchair and he would get in a lot of trouble if I didn’t. So I sat, because it was the rule and I didn’t want him to get in trouble. And for the next 6 weeks I would continue to give up control because it was the rule, or because someone else said so, or because I put someone else’s needs before mine. Looking back, the moment I sat in that chair was when I started to lose control of the life I had known. The game had changed and I was playing by someone else’s rules.

When we got into my room the tech went back downstairs to help Travis and Logan unload while I began answering the hundreds of questions my nurse had about my medical history. The monitors were turned on and I sat patiently while the nurse tried to find the baby’s heartbeat. The baby was so small and moving so much she struggled to locate it. At this point the Nurse Practitioner for the Maternal-Fetal Medicine group had arrived to greet me and they started searching together with limited success. They brought the ultrasound in to help locate the baby and while they searched I imagined them telling me that there was some mistake with the previous ultrasound because the baby looked normal and healthy. Actually, the entire time we were in the hospital I kept waiting for someone to tell me this was all a horrible mistake. No such luck. The monitor was attached to my belly and Logan was whining for me to hold him. We tried letting him lay in bed with me but he was all over the monitor and call lights. Travis took Logan out of my bed and held him while I had an IV started. Logan was overtired and probably just as scared as I was at this new place. He was whining and crying for me, all he wanted was for me to hold him. I wanted to get up and go to him and comfort him and tell him it was all going to be OK but I was stuck in bed strapped to monitors so instead I laid there, my heart breaking because I couldn’t be the mom he needed.

That night we had a brief conversation with the nurse practitioner as she reviewed the initial plan with us. I was going to be in the hospital until the baby needed to be delivered and the hope was that it would not be until the betamethasone I had been given had time to kick in and help Jellybean’s lungs mature. I had my first injection before we came to Denver. The next one would be due 24 hours later so the goal was to stay pregnant at for at least 2 more days. I started asking her the what-if questions I had been coming up with the entire car ride to the hospital. What if the baby is distressed and needs to be delivered? What are the chances of a 26 weeker surviving? Were we really going to be able to do anything medically for the baby if it arrived this early? Do we really want to provide heroic lifesaving measures for a 26 weeker? She didn’t have a lot of answers for me. It was a lot of wait and see. Then she said something along the lines of a 26 week old fetus is viable and at this point we may not have a lot of say about how much or how little care we wanted them to give, we would need to speak to the pediatricians tomorrow. She said goodnight and we all tried to get some sleep, me in the bed, Travis on the couch and Logan in his pack n’ play we brought from home.

Sleep did not come for me. My mind was racing. I kept repeating the nurse practitioner’s words over and over in my head. What did she mean when she said we might not have a lot of say? This was my child! This was MY body! We were told to come to Denver so abruptly that we hadn’t even had a chance to ask the tough questions like, is this worth doing? We wanted this baby and we loved her enough to know we didn’t want her tortured. Were they going to deliver this baby and then perform painful procedures on our child without our consent? We didn’t know enough to make any decisions about our baby’s health. We thought we were coming to Denver to get more information and figure out if this baby could be saved but now she made it seem like they were going to do whatever was necessary with or without our consent. This is a religious hospital, does the bible make our medical decisions for us? Are they operating on the theory that life is the most important thing? Because we’re more of a quality over quantity type of family. As Travis and I have seen, there are things far worse than death. I was terrified that I had made a terrible choice in coming to the hospital. I kept thinking I should have just stayed home. I just kept asking myself over and over, “what are we doing here?”