Saturday June 30th, 2007

Really, the hospital room is nice, but it isn’t designed for me sleeping on the floor. The nurse has to come in during regular intervals to take vitals. My air mattress takes up a lot of the floor space. In a tie between me and the nurses, the nurses win. Anyway, if I was looking to sleep comfortably, I would have stayed at home. After a while I get tired of lying there. It’s time to get up and …oh right, nevermind. I just read a novel until she wakes up. As I mentioned before, we have different ways of coping with fear. One of her things is that she needs me. Nothing major, just little things. Fluff the pillow. Pass the cell phone. More or less blankets. Juice. Water. More incline or less (but never flat). Help her eat breakfast. I am more than willing to all of these things and more. Even though she is lying there, her job is the hardest. How can I tell her no because I’m reading an exciting chapter or looking up sports scores on the Internet?

The mama Ali hates hospital food (Does anyone really like it?). On top of that, turning on her side to eat it scares the dickens out of me. So I feed her a few bites of powdered eggs. I remember it was powdered eggs because I fed her powdered eggs for breakfast everyday. I think she ate the equivalent of 3 eggs over 11 days. However, she just spent 20 hours lying in bed so it isn’t as if she’s using a lot of calories. In fact, neither of us does much of anything before the doctor arrives. All of the previous tests show that the baby weighs a little over a pound. That’s not enough. However, the doctor does have some good news. He is trying to get us transferred to Daytona. Daytona is a level 2 NICU, which means they may make an attempt to save the baby if we wish. Ormond can’t even make the attempt. There will be no transfer today though. I think that ‘consult’ cost over 300 bucks for him to tell us that he can’t do anything. I do nothing for free.

Anyway, the overnight bag was good, but in my haze, I forgot that she was going to be in the hospital for a while. It was time to go home and get the computer, books, ipod, etc. Plus I had another very important stop to make. Once her parents arrived, it was time to go. I went back to my empty house and grabbed enough stuff to keep an adult entertained for several days. I also made sure to grab some of our pillows and blankets. The hospital had plenty of each, but they just weren’t quite right. When you have your own linens with your familiar feel and smell, you rest better. Unfortunately, I later found out that they would not let her use much of it, but she at least got to use her own blanket on top of the hospital blankets. Anyway after a quick cry I went to the party supply store. I had to get some balloons and flowers. The clerk thought it was weird that I was still crying a bit, but she got her money and I got my balloons. Next stop would be over at Betty’s. Betty’s is a restaurant. I had to get some food to go. However, I don’t particularly like Betty’s all that much, so most of the food was for mama Ali.

It sounds short, but running all of those errands get me back to the hospital around dinnertime. In fact, it was a little after dinner because her dry roast beef and soggy toast were mostly gone. It was then that she notified me that it was time to go. For reasons of modesty and decency, I won’t go into details except to explain the general problem we faced. Having a bedpan was out of the question because of the twisting and turning she would have to do to put it in place and remove it. It would have involved a lot of abdominal muscle use – which we were trying to avoid. Thus, she had to use the toilet. However, that means being upright to get to the toilet, and then pushing at least a little bit. We knew this time would come and a day and a half is a long time, but it has to happen. It was risky, but ultimately nothing happened. That was the scariest bowel movement of my life.

The mama Ali was starting to be less scared. She never told me so, but that night she had done something for the first time in 2 days. She turned on the TV. It wasn’t on for long, but it was an attempt to relax. We watched some sitcom or something. We played with the balloons. I gave her the flowers I had killed in her honor. I fed her cake from her favorite restaurant. Our fear (and her inability to move) created a bond that we hadn’t felt in months. It was the most romantic wedding anniversary we ever had.