The Reality - Back Story - Part 8

April 2006 and Emma was discharged a few days after popping the girls out and I was already back at work. I planned to take two weeks off when the girls came home.

The Special Care Baby Unit, for me took a while to get used to. It was full of very small, mostly premature babies that needed all the help that they could get in the first few weeks of their lives. There were machines everywhere, to help them breath to monitor them and to feed them. At the start Lilly and Amy were attached to everything. There were nurses and doctors constantly buzzing around taking blood and checking them constantly.

The procedures were simple in there, babies started out at the furthest end of the unit in intensive care. As they got stronger they would move into a communal area then into their own little room and finally into a flat where the babies and parents would stay for a couple of days before going home. All of these rooms were set out so that the better the babies got the closer to the exit you were. I don’t know if was designed that way on purpose but for me it was a good way to gauge how things were getting on.

Amy

Lilly

My girls were in intensive care which meant that they were constantly monitored. The monitoring machines would go off every now and then with an alarm but the nurses would just come along take a quick look and switch it off again. Talk about how to scare a man. They were very yellow for a while with jaundice because of their under developed liver so they would have lights put on them to help them along and then blood tests would be taken. It was like they were having tanning sessions. They even had shades to protect their eyes.
I knew they were in good hands there but I hated it. No one wants to see their children like this and to see them this way for the first time for me was hell. I kept myself together for the most part and just concentrated on the positive and getting them moving ever closer to the Exit.