NICU Activation
My son does not breathe for three and a half minutes after he is born. For two-hundred and ten seconds, he is without breath. He is white and waxy. He is still.
It is 11:05 AM.
Alarms sound. A red light flashes. “NICU Activation,” the hospital intercom announces, alerting the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit that a newborn is in distress. That my baby is not drawing in air.
I suck in air from the delivery bed, waiting for his lungs to fill. The cord has been cut. I have just pushed for four hours. With each contraction, I took a deep breath in, then out, then in, then held it and pushed and pushed and pushed until the crown of his head finally slid under my pelvic bone. Everyone cheered. The OB-GYN handed me his slippery body. I kissed his nose. I cried. He did not. A nurse whisked him to a small, clear bassinet at the foot of the room. “He’s going to need assistance,” she said.
*
Now, perhaps forty seconds after is born, he is still not breathing. A herd of masked nurses and doctors flood the room. It’s a crash alert.
My baby is crashing.
In the space between my lungs, where my heart beats as fast as a hummingbird’s wings, I collapse. My husband prays and holds my hand. A neonatal doctor in a white coat appears next to my bed.
“Is he going to die?” I ask, my chest a drum that I will beat until I get an answer.
The doctor looks directly in my eyes. “All we know is that your son is not breathing.”
I hate how collected he is. “Will he die?”
“All we know is that he is not breathing.” The doctor’s tone is firm, regulated.
“Is he doing to DIE?” I say, louder, like he did not hear the question. My eyes dart between my son’s white head and the doctor’s white coat.
“Look at me,” he says so calmly it feels like a betrayal. “Keep your eyes right on me.”
I dissociate—leave my just-birthed body. I am a camera in the corner of the labor room, recording my weary self. I appear as still as my son, but inside I writhe in the coordinated spasms that pushed him into the spinning world. Below my feet, the OB-GYN sits in scrubs. There is a swath of blood on the blanket below me. I am still in labor.
*
Alarms trill. But my baby does not. He is white and waxy and still.
“Give me a half-push,” the OB-GYN says and I am back in my body. She sits at the base of the bed, between my splayed open, shaking legs.
“Huh?” It has been maybe ninety seconds.
“You have to deliver the placenta.”
How cruel, I think, if the placenta outlives the boy.
“Lord Jesus,” I hear my husband repeating next to me.
“Half push?” The OB-GYN almost apologizes.
I squeeze the shell of my womb. The placenta slides out.
I flash forward and see my blonde-haired son at his first birthday—and again when he is 7, 16, 24, 32 and having his own baby, and I know this is not how it ends—it cannot end like this—but he has not yet drawn a breath.
I do not understand how we are here. I think it is my fault.
All we know is that your son is not breathing, the doctor said moments ago, but now he looks like a statue. In his mind, I imagine he is calculating. How long can a baby go without oxygen? I wonder, or maybe I say it. It has been maybe two and half minutes. Time is shifty.
*
Two weeks before this, I sat at a waterfall, breathing in the river air and heaving it out. I was practicing how to use my lungs in a new way. It never occurred to me that my baby might need the same lesson.
Outside, the day beats on. It is now 11:08 AM. Somewhere, someone is finishing brunch, or buying papayas, or cross-stitching a birth announcement.
Back in the hospital room, things are beeping. I see tubes and bags and it has been maybe three minutes and fifteen seconds. There are still alarms. Lights. I do not cry.
It is about to turn 11:09 AM.
And then—after an arsenal of irretrievable seconds—a cry. A cry so sharp and so loud and so insistent that every single person in the room seems to close their eyes. Exhale.
At three minutes, thirty-nine seconds EXACTLY, my baby draws a breath.
Reflection:
“Our bodies are the texts that carry the memories and therefore remembering is no less than reincarnation.” – Katie Cannon, as quoted in The Body Keeps The Score
It has taken a month for me to write about my son’s respiratory distress. When tests indicated that he would not have any long-term effects from it, I quickly focused on other things: his jaundice, his latch when nursing, meeting his big sister. The intensity of simply having a newborn consumed me. I buried those three and a half minutes. They were over; we had survived.
But I could not shake a baseline nervousness I felt about my son even after we left the hospital. I cried in the mornings during my prayers, but could not identify why. I started worrying excessively about “normal” newborn issues—a gassy stomach, extra spit up, irregular sleep patterns. Everything felt like a big deal. I took him to the pediatrician and to a lactation consultant to get answers to why he was fussy. I gave him Mylicon drops and Pepcid AC and nursed him every time he peeped. He cried a lot—a sort of torment in itself—and in my postpartum haze, I could not separate issues: was the gas linked to the respiratory distress? Was he fussy because he had a difficult launch in to the world? Was he going to be a fearful and insecure adolescent? Everything felt linked and pathological.
As an attempt at self-care, I made a reiki appointment. When the reiki practitioner, Liza, asked about the birth, I recalled it somewhat matter-of-factly: I went into labor the afternoon of June 11th; effaced quickly but dilated slowly; had an epidural around midnight; started pushing around 7am. I started weeping when I told her that my son didn’t breathe at first.
“Have you processed the trauma of that?” Liza asked gently. It was the first time someone had called it a trauma. Until then, people had referred to it as a difficult birth, skimming over the emotional gravity of not knowing whether your child would live or die.
“Not really,” I said. Tears streamed down my cheeks.
We sat in silence. I knew what she was driving at: that trauma is stored in our bodies. That we cannot just ignore the cellular and psychological impact of acute stress, no matter how short the time-frame in which it occurred.
In my attempt to repress the shock, I had been unknowingly telling myself a story: “It was only three and half minutes. And he is fine now.” I had not allowed myself permission to feel the powerlessness of living through a NICU Activation—to experience how out of control it feels to not be able to protect your child. I focused instead on trying to problem solve my way through the pain—putting a microscope on how frequently my son spit up, or had gas—to ignore the root source of my own suffering.
During my reiki session, we focused on my sacral chakra—the energy center behind the womb. It felt dark and cavernous, filled with debris. Like there was something leftover.
“What happened after your son finally breathed?” Liza asked.
“He was just—gone,” I said, which was both true and not true: the nurse had put my son on my chest after he breathed. I had held him for a few seconds before they took him up the NICU for monitoring. “Both he and my husband were just, gone.”
“When else has someone in your life just been gone?” she asked.
My mother, of course (who died when I was 22 after an eight year battle with breast cancer). The layers separated, the fear of abandonment emerged, the over-concern about normal newborn issues started to make sense.
It became clear that I needed to write about my experience to externalize and release it. To witness it with the safety of knowing the ending. To gain compassion for the very new and raw mama who chose to bury her distress instead of relive it because it had activated former and formative losses. To recognize the unconscious repression as an ingredient in my postpartum depression. To discard the parts that no longer serve me. To cut the cord of trauma. To teach my body we are okay now. My son is okay. I am okay.
And so I wrote this blog and then performed a ritual to burn it—to transmute its energetic grip. But first, I finished my reiki session.
“Take a deep breath,” Liza said.
I breathed in.
“Now push it down—into your uterus.”
I filled my lungs and the whole of my abdomen, pushing the air into the empty space where my son had incubated for nine months.
“Now, let it go,” she said. “All of it.”
