Last night was a difficult night for me. I could not sleep. I just kept remembering my baby and certain details about her very short existence. I began crying when I thought that she may never have seen my face. The two times she was capable of opening her eyes, she looked at her father and a friend of the midwife's. In the NICU, she could not open her eyes. Once a nurse opened her eyelids and noticed that she was moving her eyes in the direction of sound. I went on the other side of her and called her name and she moved her eyes to look at me. I am not sure, though, if she was capable of sight.
This was one of the happiest days I shared with my baby in the NICU and, ironically, it was the beginning of the end. That day, the talk had shifted from putting in a trache and sending her home in a "vegetative" state to getting her breathing on her own and nursing. That day, things looked up.
The next day, she crashed. She was, again, unresponsive. We told the doctor that we believed she had an infection but our concerns were blown off. Two hours before she died, the doctor on call told us that he felt she had an infection. He also told us that this was the end and that he would not resuscitate her because her little body had already been through so much. He thought that she would die right away and so he quickly got her out of her crib and asked me if I wanted to hold her. I didn't need to think about it.
She held on for nearly 2 1/2 hours. I gave her life and I held her as the life left her. I am not sure how to get over this.
The NICU staff treated her like an object. Their main objective, at first, was to get us to pull the plug. We refused several times but "no" wasn't good enough. They gave up and just did nothing. They gave up and just let her get worse until she- on her own- began to get better. Then they began doing something for her. Until then, though, they just let her lay there waiting to die since we wouldn't pull the plug on her.
Certain nurses never bothered to reposition her or speak to her or even monitor her temperature even though I begged them too. She was an object; not a person. I never knew how pro- death doctors and hospitals were.
The night before she died, I knew she was going to die if she did not get help soon. I begged several times for the doctor to see her and he wouldn't. He refused. The next morning, we waited until rounds to talk with the doctor because that was when we were told we could finally see him. We waited and waited and, when we asked what was taking so long, we were told that they had decided to take a break from rounds. It was not until I asked whether or not the number of times I had asked to see the doctor had been charted that rounds finally continued.
This is the bottom line: being sued. Money. It all comes down to money.
It also is a case of pulling the plug on hopeless and useless cases so that space can be better occupied by babies that will life a productive life. My baby was an object that took up space; she was not a person or a life. She was not my child... She was a thing. Medical ethics at its finest, I suppose.
It is one thing to mourn over the loss of a child but another entirely to have to deal with this sort of evil and injustice. Today I will pray for every baby and parent in the NICU and for the people who care for them. I pray that the parents may be given the strength they need to carry on and make good decisions despite what the doctors think. I pray that the doctors and nurses may receive the grace they need to operate in a compassionate and loving way and that they may be moved to view each baby as a human being- worthy of care and respect. Finally, I pray for the babies; that God may comfort them and always let His presence be known to them.
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