Jess's Neonatal Journey

I shouldn't have given birth in New York. I was booked for a caesarean section around the 3rd or 4th of January. He was going to be born at 38 weeks, but when we went up to stay with friends for the weekend, my placenta erupted 7 weeks early. Um, I was going to get in the bath because I wasn't aware of what had happened, but my husband made me call the hospital in Lincoln

And there must have been something in my voice, but they told me I needed to go straight to York and to make sure I was seen. We thought I was probably in labour, but I wasn't entirely sure. Perhaps until we were going to leave the house and I couldn't face putting shoes on, so I had to borrow a friend's flip flops

And then in the car my waters broke so I knew for sure that I was in labour then. I did get to hold him, um. But then he was taken off to NICU

Um, I um I then had to go to theatre because um. I didn't know that my placenta had abrupted. They, they told me afterwards

And then by the time I was ready to go to visit Mac, um, he was ready to be seen as well. um. He, he was in an incubator which I had expected, and he was, he was very peaceful

He had lots of tubes in him, um, again, as I've been sort of pre-warned. That he Looked comfortable um. I wasn't able to hold him again that day

Um But we were allowed to put our hands into um put our hands on him. Really nice team came from Nottingham, because I think when a baby gets transferred, a NICU baby gets transferred, it's almost like a travelling ward. So you are travelling with, in our case, a nurse

So the handover at York Hospital's almost like a ward handover, so Mac was handed over into her care and. Um I was quite intimidated. By the size of the equipment, it had to travel in because it was, it was huge

I hadn't realised quite how huge it was going to be, but the nurse reassured me that we were travelling with the um. Anything a baby might need on their journey that that Mac hopefully would not eat. The nice thing about how open it is in Lincoln is you get much more opportunity to talk to other parents, so um we could just sort of chat to each other because it's long hours

And thankfully for me, um, Mac was only in for 17 days altogether between York and Lincoln, so our time on NICU was relatively short and at that point, Matt was no longer on any sort of oxygen. He was in, I think they call it a hot pot or something like that. So when he first arrived back he couldn't stabilise his own temperature, but we were told that that was the next step

So the first step was he'd have to be without his knitted hat on. Uh, and then he had to maintain his own body temperature whilst the cot was switched off, which he managed to do within a few days at Lincoln. Um, after that, he was being tube fed, uh, from his birth up until this point

But the plan was to get us home as quickly as possible, because I had two older children and lived close by, um, because my milk supply had come in very quickly, we were able to work towards that..