Hello lovelies,
This post is a little late in the day but I got there in the end, many of you have read Delilah’s story so far and if you haven’t then you can catch up on the first one here Going into labour at 24 weeks, the second one here Delilah’s Story (Part Two) And the third one here Delilah’s Story Part 3.
Most of those three posts are based in Oxford’s John Radcliffe NICU, where Delilah spent the first nine weeks of her life but then we had the big move back to our local hospital in Reading, as I mentioned in my previous post this was such an emotional move for me because I grew so attached to Acorn in Oxford and all the doctors and nurses there were so amazing and felt like family with how much care they gave our little girl and moving back to Reading was going back into the unknown it was really quite scary.
Sadly our first day (or first few hours) back in reading seemed to just bring my fears to life. Ben and I arrived at Buscot and after giving the doctors and nurses the time they needed to get everything settled in with Lilah, we then went into the red room to find out how she was doing.
But right away there was something a little off about her nurse at first I just thought she wasn’t that friendly (no biggie as long as she looked after Delilah well) but then Delilah started to cry purely because her dummy that Oxford had given her a few weeks beforehand was slightly out of reach. And this nurse just turned to Delilah and said oh well don’t be thinking you are going to get your own way here because your not and moved the dummy further away from her.
At first I just stood there in shock Delilah was still so, so tiny still at the 3 pound mark and this dummy was the first nice thing that she had, had that was her very own that didn’t cause pain and gave her that bit of comfort, of course I quickly went and gave it back to Delilah was it filled me with dread and I spent most of that day crying my eyes out.
Thankfully even though we spent a further three months almost in Buscot I never came across this nurse again (something I was very pleased about) and the rest of the doctors and nurses where amazing I couldn’t of dreamed of nicer people to look after her and make her strong enough for the outside world.
The next thing I found hard was being further away from the hospital because even though we were back in our home town it took us so much longer to get to the hospital each day, but I was so glad that Delilah got to see her brothers and Nanny more as it was that little bit easier for everyone else to get there, and Delilah got to meet her Granny Ann (Ben’s step-mum) for the first time too.
And although Delilah still had more then her fair share of hiccups along the way it was amazing watching her grow and get stronger. Although some days it still felt like we would still never get to bring her home, especially each time she had her jabs she would be fine for the first 25 hours afterwards but I could literally time it and on the 26 hour mark she would stop breathing for quite a long amount of time (one of those times was when I was giving her a feed and she nearly gave me a bloody heart attack)
But so many wonderful things happened once she was back in Buscot too, she had her first Bottle feed (up until this point she had only been tube fed and I was so terrified whenever it was my time to feed her as I was so worried of her stopping breathing when I was feeding her as I mentioned before I was just terrified I would do something wrong.
And I can so clearly remember the first time a nurse handed her to me just like a full term baby (until then we had only ever done kangaroo care) Thankfully my mum was in the family room and I made Ben go out and get her because as silly as it sounds I truly never thought I would get to hold her like that and I have never cried so many happy tears.
Of course we still had so many scares including when she had to go back to Oxford for eye surgery due to ROP and we didn’t know whether she would have any sight left at all even after surgery. But again thanks to some very talented doctors it worked brilliantly and her sight was saved and so that was a very short trip back. But we never even knew that she needed the surgery until the night before it happened it just very suddenly went downhill and the next thing we knew we where being told that if they didn’t do something in the next 24 hours she would be blind.
I did worry because she had to be put back onto the ventilator that they would struggle to wean her off of it again because Delilah had this thing at that point that if she had a choice she just wouldn’t bother breathing but after only a few hours back in Buscot she was back onto Cpap. Although they did have to put a cannula in her head before the trip back to oxford and that was a scary sight (although I did in the end think it looked rather like a fascinator) it’s small thought like these that kept me sane back then haha.
Do you see what I mean about the fascinator???
There where so many other scary and brilliant things that happened in Buscot but once again I think this post is long enough so maybe we could save them for another day,
But for now …
Thanks for reading,
Love Benita x
Benitas Mummy bits and bobs 