Melody Schreiber - What We Didnt Expect: Personal Stories about Premature Birth

A few days after my tiny son first came home from the hospital, my exhausted brain finally remembered the books. Yes, the books! They would tell me what to do! I cracked open What to Expect the First Yearand immediately I started bawling.

My very premature baby faced a range of complications. His heart was failing, making him take about twice as many breaths as normal. Breastfeeding exerted him too much; instead, he was fed through a tube threaded through his nose. Often, his milk meals came right back up again when pressure from his swollen heart pushed against his stomach; I was terrified of leaving him alone for even a moment in case he choked on his vomit again. He was taking a host of potentially dangerous medications, and our lives revolved around appointments with specialists and his upcoming open-heart surgery. His diaper bag was packed with medical recordshospital transfer and discharge papers, notes on medications and side effects, instructions on feeding and following up with specialists.

None of this was what we had expected.

When my water broke at twenty-seven weeks and four days, everything changed. The drive to the hospital was nothing like I had anticipated for the past seven monthsmy belly was not enormous, I was not wracked by contractions. My husband drove nervously, cautiously, as fast as he could. The car was eerily silent. I kept my fingers spread over my stomach. Not yet, I told the son within. Hold on just a little longer. Please, baby.

After checking into the hospital, I settled into strict bed rest and began consulting with neonatologists about their plans for our babys care once he arrived. There was so much we were learning on the fly; so much we never thought wed need to know, now filling our heads and our hearts. Although we hoped he would waitevery day in utero was comparable to three days of growth and development in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), we learnedwe knew the baby would not be full-term; if by some miracle the pregnancy reached thirty-four weeks, when his lungs and brain and body would be nearly mature, I would be induced in order to avoid infection and other complications. It was unnerving to know ahead of time he was going to be premature, while at the same time knowing there was nothing we could do to make his entry into the world any safer or less complicated. All we could really do was hope that he would wait. Just a little longer.

And he did; unlike the majority of pregnancies in which the water breaks earlya condition known as preterm premature rupture of membranesmy baby waited a full eighteen days. He was born twenty-nine weeks and six days into the pregnancy, and he was immediately taken to the NICU, where he would stay for more than two months.

There was nothing in the usual parenting books about how to address needs like his. On the contrary, those baby books were a painful reminder of the sharp turn our path had taken, and how far from the normal milestones we were drifting. For the first time in my life, books had failed me. I struggled to find stories that resonated with mestories that would show me and my husband and our families a path forward in such a harrowing time. I felt intensely alone. Books had abandoned me, so I abandoned them; I put them back on the shelf, spines uncreased and pages smooth. It was another way in which this whole experience wouldnt go the way we had planned. We would simply have to go it alone.