As long time readers may remember, my daughter became very ill a short time after she was born. The very short version of the very long story is that our baby got an infection that turned septic, and within a few days of being released from the hospital almost died. Unfortunately the signs of her illness were all fairly ambiguous things that often show up in perfectly healthy babies. The important thing is that we trusted our instincts and took her to the pediatrician, who in turn realized how sick she was and sent us immediately to an amazing hospital.
We hadn't even really had time to process the fact that we were, in fact, parents when the LM became sick enough that it was a very likely possibility that we would lose her. She was in early stages of organ failure by the time we reached the Emergency Room. Once she was stabilized enough to be moved to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) it was six hours before we saw her again. When we finally were allowed to see her, she was on a ventilator and had so many wires and tubes coming out of her that the only place it was safe to touch her was one of her legs. She was drugged on morphine to deal with the pain she was in.
Her room was a single (as were all the rooms because most of the PICU patients were immunocompromised in some way and sharing a room was a risk to their fragile health). There was a couch that folded down into a single bed. So that we could both stay with the LM in the hospital, we were also given a parent room down the hall on the same floor of the PICU. It was a very small room with a twin bed, a chair and a small bed table. Sexyhusband and I took shifts sleeping in the parent room and in the LM's room, and during the day we both hovered over the LM...talking to her, talking to her many many many doctors and worrying.
I was furious that my 7 days post partum body had needs I had to attend to. That I had to stop worrying about my daughter for five minutes to try to worry about pads to soak up the lochia. Luckily, that one was handled by the nurses, who got pads from a post partum floor. If they hadn't been bringing me food because I was breastfeeding I would have resented having to leave the room to eat.
Sex was something that had no meaning for me. There was nothing that was farther from my mind, especially when several days later we found out that the LM had also had the further complication of a brain bleed. That there might be brain damage.
This is not to say that Sexyhusband and I were distant from each other. There was a lot of crying, a lot of holding each other while we cried, and a lot of holding each other and hoping. But it was not sexual, at least for me. It was about comfort.
We are lucky in that we have a large circle of friends and family locally. But for the most part we cut ourselves off from them with the exception of updating people through a specialized medical blog. This was in part to prevent phone calls, and also because I needed to write or I would go crazy.
I reached out for Sexyhusband instead of my best friends because he was the only one who understood, viscerally, what was really at stake and who cared about this little baby as much as I did.
When they finally extubated her (took her off the ventilator) he and I were there together. When the nurse let me change the LM's diapers, even with all the cords, he stood with me, and was as excited as I was that her umbillical stump had falled off and we could now see her perfect little belly button.
As the days passed and the doctors used phrases like "recovering much faster than we expected" and "move her to the children's floor" the world began to open up again. We left the hospital for dinner. We ran back to our apartment for things like DVD's to watch in the LM's room. Our kisses became more about affection than comfort.
When the LM was moved to the children's room, it was a shared room. We could still have a cot in the room, but only one of us could sleep there at a time. We got a hotel room down the street so that the person not with the LM could at least sleep in a real bed. Eventually we let the LM's grandparents spend time at her bedside so that we could go back to the hotel together. It was still too soon for sex, but DN and Sexyhusband began to interact as people and not just react to the world as the LM's parents.
It was an important first step back towards regaining our sexuality as a couple.
It's easy to see how tragedy can ruin a marriage. There were times when I thought about what would happen to us if we did lose the LM, and there were times when I thought in my heart that would happen would be divorce. I'm still not sure if that was just my general despair and my depression talking, or if I was serious. There were times when I had nowhere to direct my intense anger over my child's illness when I would direct it at Sexyhusband because he could sleep and I had to constantly wake up and pump (and no, no one was holding a gun to my head to pump, and no one would have faulted me for giving up pumping but it was the only thing I could do to help my child, so I did it...but hated every minute), or that he had missed rounds in the morning, or because he looked at me the wrong way. Maybe I thought about divorce because I was so emotionally exhausted that having one less person to worry about was appealling. I don't know. I do know that I spent more time thinking about it than Sexyhusband knows. It would have been so easy to pull away emotionally, to say "I realize you're in pain, but I just can't own your pain too", to isolate myself. But I didn't. And our marriage came out stronger because I did push back the urges to pull away from SH and instead reached out to him even as I thought about divorce.
We were incredibly lucky. I am not exaggerating when I say there was a point when the odds of her survival were not in our favor. That she was able to come home, and that we came out of our tragedy stronger as a marriage than we knew we could be are things I will never take for granted.
We came out stronger. More committed to each other. More committed to being good parents (not that we walked into the L&D room with the goal of slacker parents of the year). It's important that we were, because while we were on the road to regaining our closeness, it was still a road that would test us.
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