Ooooohh my ears were burning yesterday!
Christy of From the Mountain Top to the Valley Floor, a mom/blogger I greatly admire, is facing a transition in her life and with it floods back a lot of raw emotion for her beautiful son, Elias and their months on the NICU roller coaster. Christy is saying good-bye to her job as a NICU Parent Navigator. I can imagine what a difficult decision this was for her.
She writes:
I’m leaving because I can’t be there without reliving Elias. Because I’m learning how sick Elias was those first few weeks.
How he was one of the ones the nurses worry won’t make it.
NICU nurses. Nurses who hold wonder in their hands. Who see parents raw. Who thread the arteries of babies the size of a soup can. Babies with thin skin that dangles from muscles and bones. No pudge babies that can’t be held.
Please think about that: Babies that can’t be held.
But there is always a NICU nurse by their side because their job is to keep them alive.
If I could reach all the way up to Alaska, where she lives, I would hug Christy right now.
It’s okay.
Honestly, I feel this pain, this raw terror every time I care for a tiny 24 weeker who is barely hanging on. I see my own boy too. My own clinical experience then had me thinking that he just might not make it. I wasn’t the only one who thought that during those first few weeks. Today, that experience makes me cry tears of joy sometimes when I am beholding this amazing little (excuse me) BIG boy that is my son.

I don’t think we will ever let go of that sense of vertigo from that long roller coaster ride even if we choose to never set foot in a NICU again. But really that is okay. It’s normal.
It’s our normal as parents of NICU graduates.
We take nothing for granted and I do mean nothing.