Tattoons and other random thoughts tonight

The thing about hospital stays is how magnified everything feels. The smallest bit of good news warrants a parade down Main Street. The smallest bit of disappointing news has you sitting in sackcloth and ashes. At least it’s been that way for me. 

Mary Katherine’s fever disappears and I’m on cloud nine. Her oxygen levels drop a few percentage points and I am tearful all evening. The facts of our general situation stay relatively unchanged, but my heart is swinging back and forth like it’s dragging behind MaryKat’s little purple swing.

Just to give you an update, we are generally in a good place. Her temperature, heat rate, respiration rate, blood work and overall demeanor are all great. She is eating and sleeping well and has even smiled a time or two at the nurses. But her oxygen still isn’t what it should be. They want her over 90 (I’ve heard someone say 94…?) and she is jumping back and forth from 82 to 87. So right now we are really just waiting for those blinking digital numbers on the screen to stop dropping once we turn her oxygen off.

I am so grateful for the good medical care here and am in no rush to take a still-unwell baby home. I am no longer sick with worry now that she seems more like her old (still-quite-new) self. And as something of an introvert I haven’t minded the walls of this tiny room 24/7 and four days of no sunshine nearly as much as you might think. Now that I am a bit caught up on sleep I read a lot and piddle around on the internet. Thank goodness for Kindles.

Even so, last night I went to bed with a knot in my stomach I felt like I could feel with my hand if I wanted to. (My emotions and body often get their wires crossed like that. Homesickness feels like thirst to me, a weird thing my sister claims to experience too.) The blah-ness may have something to do with hearing the little kid crying in discomfort next door or reading an eerie book about genetic research and civil rights abuses that made me feel yucky (a Kindle special. Go figure). But more than anything I think I am just missing Bryan and Annabelle, my firstborn who is still just a baby too. The nursing staff don’t really want her to get exposed to more germs up here visiting, especially as she is just getting over something too, and she isn’t really happy stuck in a little room with sick baby sister and no toys anyway. She adores her Papa and is having a blast with him. But generally, our little family doesn’t do well apart for too long.

That being said I had the great joy of having a lunch date with Annabelle today. Bryan hung out with MaryKat while Annabelle and I crossed the street to a Java House where we finished off lunch with ice-cream cones and milk-shakes. I still can’t believe sometimes that I can sit in a restaurant booth and have hilarious conversations with my not-quite two year old. My favorite thing she does these days is ask a question, (“That is?”), receive the answer (“That’s an external hard-drive for the computer,”), after which she thinks for a second then throws her head back in affected laughter and says “Oh yeah…” as though she had just momentarily forgotten something she had known all along.

 

Before she left the hospital Annabelle and I each put on one of her stick-on tattoos (“tattoons” she calls them, which seems appropriate to me). She picked out a koala bear for her tummy. I got a butterfly for my hand. I told her it would help me not miss her so much while we are apart. And even though her Papa says she is a little clingy and emotional while I am away, she says goodbye very matter-of-factly and doesn’t make a big scene. This helps my heart.

So I crawl into bed tonight so thinking of all the families that have to do this for weeks or months even and say thank you that only five days apart feels so sad. I kiss the baby beside me in her little hospital gown that makes her look like an old-fashioned baby doll; I talk for a long time to Bryan on the phone and then tell him I love him; and I kiss my tattoon. 

It will be good to have all this behind us.

Back to the Hospital

It seems unfair to the last month to be writing in the pale glow of a hospital room again, with the soft ripple of bubbles in an oxygen filter nearby and my baby’s raspy breathing in the cot next to me. I have had so many blogs churning in my mind that never made it out – blogs about long walks on the beach of my childhood with my baby, leaving footprints in the damp fanfare of sand strewn from crab holes; blogs about three weeks with my mama, drinking chai after we finally got the girls to sleep and talking and crying about mothers and daughters and the fierce connection between them; blogs about the steady ache to be back in North Africa instead of the comfortable drift of roaming from one nice house to another here in Nairobi while we wait for a place to call home.

But I never wrote the words down, mostly because of the chaotic beauty of being a fulltime mother these days. Blogs, like sleep, have been hard to come by. But, one of the odd upsides to being in the hospital is a little more time to myself to do things like write. Time that I would happily give back.

Bryan was the first to come down with upper respiratory crud but Annabelle and Mary Katherine quickly followed suit. The mysterious super-shield that keeps mamas’ immune systems up in order to take care of the family has held up for me so far (though I am preparing for the inevitable crash when this is all said and done.) We took everyone to the doctor on Saturday morning and by Sunday Annabelle and Bryan were improving. But MK was not. She had fits of violent coughing that made my heart stop and then she started vomiting. All day Sunday I could hardly rouse her to eat much less do anything else. By evening we started deliberating whether or not we could wait until morning to see our pediatrician or if we should go ahead and take her to the ER. But when she started looking pale and frighteningly lethargic, our decision was easy.

It was around nine when I threw the diaper bag in the car and strapped a listless MaryKat into her seat. Bryan stayed behind with Annabelle who was already in bed, though I could tell it was killing him not to come with us. But with a toddler and a nursing baby there was little choice. I haven’t driven in Nairobi at night before and I was a little nervous. As I made my way through poorly lit round-abouts, harrowing high-speed two lane roads and a couple of wrecks I was just imagining scratching out the eyes of the corrupt cop that pulled me over to ask for a bribe. Normally I am an intimidated mess around police (at least on the inside) but God help the unsuspecting person that chose to mess with me that night. Thankfully, no one did and I made it to the hospital in good time. Mary Katherine was coughing the whole way and as I turned into the parking lot she started vomiting and choking. I screeched into a parking spot and scrambled to get her inside.

By the time I got her into the hospital she was white as a sheet and limp on my shoulder. Her breathing, which I was obsessively checking, was shallow and irregular. After what felt like months of paperwork I was directed to the pediatric waiting area where I sat down with a dozen coughing kids and their sleepy parents listening to a journalist wax on about the looming Kenyan elections on the TV above. Eventually a triage nurse called me back to look at MaryKat. Moments after checking her out she was ushering us down a hall to a room full of curtained off beds and fitting an oxygen mask over my baby’s face. At the time the number “65” didn’t mean anything to me. But now knowing that it should have been over 94, I feel sick to my stomach.  

The 48 hours after that have been a blur. I feel like I remember everything that has happened – the breathing treatments, the x-rays, the visits from Bryan and Annabelle - but I have no sense of chronology or time. I sleep when MaryKat sleeps, which is often only 20 minutes at a time with no respect to night or day. I can’t remember what was an hour ago or a day ago. She and I are both exhausted.

But, thank God, her heart rate and respiration rate have settled and on oxygen she is alert and hungry. The chest x-rays showed this was not pneumonia but just a really bad virus so now we just wait until she can pull enough oxygen into those little lungs on her own. Tonight when they took her off O2 her numbers were at 78 – still not good enough to go home. But her congestion is clearing, just slowly.

My precious cousin Terron who is working here for a year spent the day with Annabelle (having tea-parties and comforting baby dolls no doubt. She has a huge crush on her cousin-uncle) so that Bryan could be with Mary Katherine and me. Just a few hours with him and I think we both feel like we can go on with a little more grace. Four am last night was not our finest hour with all her tubes only allowing about a three foot circle to pace in when she (we) was crying. At one point a poor nursing student tiptoed in to take MK’s vitals and when he saw me I could see him mentally scanning his textbooks for the chapter on “What to do when you walk in on a bawling sleep-deprived anxiety-ridden white woman at 3am.” But tonight I think she and I are both encouraged and optimistic about a few hours sleep. She’s squeaking away in her little swing that her Papa brought up and I will curl up under the circus sheets on the hospital bed. We’ll see how the night goes.

As always, thank you for your prayers. 

Post Script: I ran out of internet credit for my computer last night so I didn’t get to post this until now, twelve hours later with about six hours of sleep under my belt and almost double that for MK. Plus her O2 levels are now at 90%. I am so happy!