Today's featured Preemie Dad is Marc Mapes. You can follow him on twitter @marcmapes and he blogs here. As you will read Marc is the father of a premature son - a 28 weeker! Marc and I have similar stories, in fact, both of our wives are pregnant again and are about 30 weeks along - Congratulations to Marc and his wife for a more successful pregnancy this time around and good luck the rest of the way!
November 4, 2007. The
day my wife was due to deliver our first baby.
Unfortunately, he had other ideas.
Due to circumstances that were never fully discovered, our son Barrett
was born on August 13th at 28 weeks and two days, He weighed an
impossibly small two pounds and seven ounces, but as the doctor put it “he came
into the world screaming and peeing” - which apparently is a good sign.
Prior to the day of delivery, my wife had been in the
hospital for almost a week and the doctors used every technique known to modern
medicine to prevent the pre-term birth. Looking
back now, I hope I never feel more helpless than I did that week, and
especially that day. To add to the
drama, other circumstances made it necessary for the birth to be performed as a
crash c-section so I wasn’t able to be in the room. The first time I saw my son
he was being wheeled past me in a plastic bubble with multi-colored tubes and
wires everywhere. Not exactly the way we all plan seeing our children for the
first time.
Barrett spent 10 weeks in the NICU. That period can best be described as a roller
coaster ride of emotion (for us) and physical setbacks and incremental improvements
(for him). I will never forget the sound
the monitors made when his heart rate would fall below the acceptable level,
the “kangaroo” sessions, the tube feedings and the look on my wife’s face every
night we got in our car to go home without our son. The doctor’s original
long-term prognosis was pretty devastating, but he continued to steadily
improve. Luckily, we lived very close to the NICU so I was able to stop and see
him every morning before work and we would spend every evening there with other
parents and nurses instead of in our home learning how to be a family in
private.
Our son is now three and with the exception of having to
wear glasses due to his retinopathy of prematurity, he shows no signs of coming
into the world 3 months early. I have no
way of knowing if our experience during this time has made me a better father,
but it has made me appreciate the delicate miracle of life and the importance
of family. I’m happy to also report that
as I write this my wife is over 30 weeks along with our second baby, so it
appears the circumstances causing our son’s prematurity will always remain one
of life’s great mysteries.
