Dredging up some mixed emotions…part 1

So I am currently 3 posts in...phew!  The birth of Alfie and the immediate days following his arrival seem a very long time ago now and yet still so new somehow.  Although we haven’t forgotten what those first days and months were like, we try not to dwell on them too much; I won’t lie, sometimes they were painful and traumatic.

For todays post I wanted to talk about the emotions we felt during those first few days and weeks.  Some of this is really hard  to talk about; some of it is not easy to even think about. Some of it I have spoken about; some I haven’t shared at all. When Alfie is older I will tell him all of this, we won’t hide anything from him.  In the future if he decided to start a family of his own he would be prepared not only for the huge range of emotions that comes with the birth of a child but also the ones that emerge following the birth of a child with a rare medical condition.

I talked about the birth and what happened in those first few days following Alfie’s early arrival into this world.  I didn’t talk much about what was going through my head and to be honest sometimes it is still hard to talk about.  If you catch me on a bad day I could easily cry when I recall how I felt back then. 

Immediately after Alfie was born and I was holding him in my arms, I think I was still in shock about how early he was, how unprepared we were and above all how much I loved this little bundle of baby I was holding.  I never initially wanted children, I was never particularly motherly or a maternal person and other peoples kids, especially babies, freaked me out a bit but from the moment I found out I was pregnant I couldn’t imagine not having children around.  This little boy helped me discover a whole world of new emotions I never knew I had.  Alfie is named after my papa Alf who holds a really special place in my heart and it turns out that Alfie and Alf share a lot of personality traits!

When we found out that Alfie had something going on with his skin following the birth we were obviously very worried and I think at that point Lee was more worried than me.  I was still in the post-birth fog of the Entonox and was high on the love for my new baby boy.  I remember looking at Lee who was watching the midwives inspecting Alfie and just telling him that he would be ok.  I remember ringing my mum to tell her that Alfie had arrived and I said that he had something a bit wrong with his skin but nothing serious – we literally had no clue what was going on and I didn’t want anyone to worry.

And then I crashed back down to earth.  I can honestly say that seeing Alfie properly for the first time was so scary.  He had been taken to the neonatal unit and he was in a humidified incubator, skin peeling, surrounded by very sick babies; my heart broke into a million pieces.  I know that sounds a little dramatic but anyone who has carried a child for 9 months to be told that there is something wrong with them will get that.  I worried over everything; what was wrong with my baby, would he live, how would we cope, WHAT THE HELL WAS WRONG??

The nurses were lovely.  They showed us how to change his nappy (not easy wearing gloves and doing all of that through holes in the incubator), they showed us how to touch him so he knew we were there. Later on the asked me if I wanted to give him his milk and I remember thinking that I didn’t want to because I was absolutely petrified of hurting him.  I did it though and it was the best feeling ever. 

Going home from the hospital without our son was awful.  We saw all of those new parents carrying their newborn babies out to the car and we had to leave our baby in the hospital; it just felt weird.  We spent the next 6 days going to and from the hospital which was exhausting but on the upside we got a good nights sleep at night which felt weird at the time but thinking back was probably the best thing because we were able to get some rest to try to prepare ourselves for bringing our little boy home.

Days at the hospital were spent googling ichthyosis, arranging dermatology appointments, bathing, creaming, bandaging and (for me) expressing milk to feed Alfie.  The first time we bathed our baby was extremely scary; we were petrified that we were going to hurt him and to be honest, we probably did hurt him a bit because his skin was so raw.  The thought of this makes me feel physically sick.  Days at the hospital also made us feel safe, we knew if we needed help it would be there, so when we were told we could go home we were happy, excited but also really apprehensive.   

Alfie became quite famous at the hospital in his first few days on the earth.  Because his condition is so rare, no one at the hospital had any experience of it so he got a lot of attention.  Lots of doctors came to see him and examine him, no one had any answers.  One of the doctors on rotation has ended up as a GP at our practice, she remembers Alfie from those early days.  Once seen, this little boy is never forgotten!!

We were in a little bubble while Alfie was in hospital, the nurses looked after us as well as Alfie.  My mum looked after us at home making sure we had food and everything was tidy for us to come home to considering we had only moved in to our house a few days before Alfie decided to arrive.   Sitting here writing this feels so weird.  I can remember things from those early days and months but it feels like it happened to someone else. Not because I don’t want to think about it but because he has come such a long way since then and as a family we have learnt more in the last 4 years than we ever have.

There is so much more I want to say on this subject and im finding it quite hard to get everything down that I want to.  There will be a part 2 tomorrow…..!