Have you had a premmie baby?

Oh, you have?

So you know.

You understand what it’s like to have your baby too soon.

You know the fear that rises up into your throat like a ball of fire when the doctors say that the baby is coming now.

You know how the world spins out of control as you do the calculations, listen to the statistics.

You remember the different emotions all mingled in together with the tears and the sweat and the adrenaline.

Hope.

Fear.

Excitement

and

reluctance

You know that feeling of wanting everything to be okay,

waiting for that first cry and celebrating when you hear the tiny mewing, so different from your expectations

or

waiting for that first cry and hearing nothing

but the quick, sharp movements of the midwives and doctors -

orders barking across the room and if you look to the open resuscitation table, you catch that first glimspe of your baby.

Boy or girl.

Twins, maybe.

You’ve had a baby born too soon so you remember the tears, you remember those tiny little faces and crinkled eyes with milky blue newness peering out into the world.

You know that first, catch your breath moment of love, the first tentative touch before watching scrubbed in,blue gowned nurses run with your baby through the doors and out into the unknown.

If your little baby was ventilated, the memory of the hiss and whoomph of the machine, may still wake you at night,

the thought of the CPAP machine, pushing vital air into tiny lungs, just a little too underdeveloped to be able to work on their own.

The nasal canula covered in tape, pushing up tiny noses, which the NICU nurses refer to as ‘piggy’.

You remember the strange sights and smells and the sounds of the life giving machines that buzz and ping in the NICU and how your baby was wired up and canulated and monitored so that sometimes you could hardly believe that there was a baby in amongst all of that medical copper.

Doctors and nurses giving you updates on this tiny little creature, who is so much yours but in  many ways not your own. You nod and take it in, seconds later not remembering a thing, except for the first time you reached into the humidicrib and stroked the soft downy newborn fuzz and felt the warmth as your baby grasped your giant pinky finger.

There are words that keep you up long into the night, big words, bigger risks, while you sit and pump the milk that will eventually be tubed into a stomach that is the size of a marble.

If you are a dad you might have stood by your new baby’s incubator and wondered when this would end, wondered why it had happened and how you are going to juggle family and work and now daily trips into the hospital.

You will know about the babes that didn’t make it. You will remember them long after they have left this world.

You will know the mixed feelings.

Horror, sadness but thankfulness that your baby is still hanging in there.

You remember.

You might know how it feels when your baby stops breathing.

Those heart stopping minutes as strangers work to save a little life.

The absolute relief when they are stable once more, the apnoea machines that alarm and the sternal rub that you become quite good at in those early weeks because your baby forgets to breathe more than once a day.

You’ve had a premmie baby, so you know.

You can remember the first feed that wasn’t a tube, the very first bath outside of the humidicrib, the first 24 hours without oxygen.

You know that often it’s one step forward and two steps back

and then one day it’s just three steps forward.

You know about the little celebrations,

hitting the 2kg mark (knowing that home is not far away),

the first time they wear clothes instead of nothing but a nappy and how happy it makes you feel.

I know that , if you were one of the lucky ones, you can recall that last day in the NICU when you said goodbye, to the doctors and the nurses who had become your world, for a while.

Those first shakey steps out of the unit.

Perhaps, like me, you stopped dead at the doors of the hospital, unable to move, fearful of what lay ahead, wondering how you would cope with these tiny little beings, without the support of the NICU.

I remember those days that bled into weeks and then months.

I look at them.

I know they are miracles.

I remember.

It’s Premmie Awareness week in Australia.