Neonatal, a surreal world and South African pride

For Ashton it is the winter school holidays and Dave has taken him down to see his folks on the coast.  It is a welcome break for him to spend time with his Grandparents and be fussed over as he hasn’t had much of that for the past few months.

Ashton was so excited and buzzed around like a little bee when packing his bag, we talk on the phone in the evenings and he seems to be having a whale of a time with his Dad collecting shells on the beach and just being a little boy.  It has been a crazy year to date to say the least and this is a welcome opportunity to just breathe.  I am thoroughly enjoying the one one-on-one time with Luke, it feels as though Ashton got 100% of me for four months and Luke is getting 4 days, but I realise that babies are born into families, the context of which shapes their lives and Luke will never know a time when Ashton wasn’t there.  The house, however, is VERY quiet, but I think this is a very important time for Luke and I.

The pregnancy was a tough one, on the one hand it was physically – nothing less than gruelling, but on a spiritual level, it was the most incredible gift.  The process really connected me with other people in a way that I find difficult to define now, but at the time, I really understood the meaning of “we are all connected”. We had a wonderful team, from friends to family and the medical team were really fantastic but the going really did get tough at one point and during the course of the last trimester I didn’t know whether it would be: living Luke, loving Luke or losing Luke, now I realise that if I really listen to Luke – I learn from him.

The pregnancy was a tough one, on the one hand it was physically – nothing less than gruelling, but on a spiritual level, it was the most incredible gift.  The process really connected me with other people in a way that I find difficult to define now, but at the time, I really understood the meaning of “we are all connected”. We had a wonderful team, from friends to family and the medical team were really fantastic but the going really did get tough at one point and during the course of the last trimester I didn’t know whether it would be: living Luke, loving Luke or losing Luke, now I realise that if I really listen to Luke – I learn from him.

This might all sound a little crazy but the pregnancy and birth have truly been a wonderful and tragic time all together, the details of which I won’t go into now, maybe one day in the distant future, or perhaps I will forget, we have many challenges ahead of us, but then I suppose having children is largely like that, you just don’t know.  At any rate, Luke was born on the 15th of May 2009 in the early hours of the morning, after two previous “shows” huge clots of blood that came out that I believe, were a warning of his impending birth which resulted in me being hospitalised for 3 – 4 days on each occasion in an attempt to keep the baby inside, at the third occasion of this, the gynae (and I) agreed that the baby was better off outside my body than in, a tough choice for a doctor, who seems to have to weigh up the risk of delivering a premature, underweight baby who might go into ICU, develop an infection and die, against leaving the baby inside the mother, where it is not growing at a significant enough rate.  Tough choice, given that he knew it was my last chance at having a second child.

At any rate, in the end, the choice to arrive was Luke’s and he was born at 37 weeks at a mere 1.8 kg’s and spent three and a half weeks in ICU where the ICU nurses kept a vigilant eye on him.

I have learned so much about human nature in this period.  The daily visits to Neonatal are a surreal experience.  It almost feels other-worldly.  As you enter the first set of doors you have to scrub down and leave the fast-paced, manic, bacteria-full world and change into a new-mom only environment which is uber clean and almost wordless, the only noise emanates from the steady beep beep of the machines which incubate and insulate these tiny, fragile babies who have made a bumpy landing into the world.  In this space nothing else exists except feeding, burping, nurturing and bonding with my baby, it is almost meditative.

The nurses communicate almost wordlessly.  I have never met a team of such uber perceptive people, whose work has tuned them into the silent body language of mothers and taught them how to respond and communicate in a way that gives the mom a sense of comfort but quiet strength to keep going through what feels like a daily battle.  This experience has made me so proud, so proud to be South African and so proud of what everyone is doing in support of Luke and his progress.  It doesn’t matter what colour, race, religion or sex the baby is, each one of them is treated with the utmost of care and vigilance no matter what race, colour, religion or age of the nurse.  Given the context of the history of South Africa, this is a revelation to me.  What I am witnessing here in the Neonatal ward of Sunninghill Hospital is real, the real expression of what Nelson Mandela’s vision was of a true united nation irrespective of your colour and here it is playing itself out in front of me.  That makes me so proud, proud of whom I am and where I live and proud of the country in which I live.