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!