the bitch beast subsides
as you know, i’ve had a hard time dealing with baby A being in the NICU and his parents’ reaction, or lack of action to it. today i had an oppertunity to be in the NICU for a while with the Crazy SIL. and while i feel like she’s not as detached as i initially thought, i’m still having a hard time relating to how things are going.
i’m not the type of person who can abide in some state of ingnorant bliss. i need to know stuff. the ventilator alarm is going off…her reaction “oh it does that all the time”. my reaction “why is it going off and what does it mean for baby?” the nurses come and go, they tweak stuff and watch the monitors and then leave. what are they doing? what are they looking at and what does it mean for baby? Crazy SIL can just let it all gloss over, shrug and say, if it was major, they’d tell me.
in some ways i envy her that.
in other ways - i feel like she needs to be there - and when she’s there she needs to be present.
medically, baby A could be doing better. they had to put a PIC line in his little twig arm, and an IV port in his little twig leg. he now has a chest tube, due to an air bubble in his little chest. he could be doing worse, but he is looking less like a baby and more like a stereo with all the tubes going into him. and the new ventilator is so loud he has to wear ear-muffs, and he was under the bili-light so he had a eye-mask on. and for the first time ever today i thought - at what point would i say, enough?