Tuesday

Mission Marty – today was all about getting to Nantes; me transferred to the hospital and Mark, Jon and Robyn packed up from our holiday cabin and into the new Air BnB house.

My baby had been born over 24 hours ago now and I still hadn’t met him properly or touched him. I was worried about how I was feeling, or not feeling; surely I should be scratching and wailing at the door, begging the nurses to get me to him. But I wasn’t, I was frustrated yes but I didn’t feel any connection to Marty. That was an awful feeling to acknowledge at the time, unnatural, and is still a horrible thing to admit and write down now. Again, I thought back to when I had Robyn – the hours spent cuddling her, looking into her eyes, feeding her. I remember Mark tried to take her for a walk when she was about 4-5 days old; as soon as the left I had feelings I’d never experienced before, I was pacing around the house (house / building site) and just wanted her back with me. I actually called him and told him to bring her home after about 5 minutes! But now, my son was in another city with a load of strangers and I just felt numb. I tried to reassure myself that it was because I hadn’t had all of those usual moments with him but I was genuinely worried that we’d never make that connection.

Dr Frey came to see me in the morning, I was really glad to be able to see her again and say thank you for all she’d done. She confirmed that I did have an infection, and this would have been passed on to Marty. She was waiting for results back from my placenta sample to confirm exactly what it was. But for now, Marty and I remained on antibiotics to fight whatever this thing was. The sooner the results were back, the sooner we could be on more tailored medication. I couldn’t believe that I could feel totally fine but have this infection that basically ejected my baby from my body at speed - a doctor later described Marty's birth as brutal. I was always pretty healthy, never the one picking up colds or illnesses. Everyone said they thought I was pretty bulletproof with this type of thing, obviously not.

The majority of the rest of my day was literally spent waiting. Mark and co got packed up at lunch time and headed off to Nantes, I so wanted to be with them. I left my room for the first time and went down to the nurses station to find out what was going on. I’m a fairly accommodating and flexible person (I’ve been told) so asserting my authority in French was an interesting one. After what seemed like hours of them saying they were waiting to hear back from Nantes, a nurse came in to tell me they’d found a room and some transport was on the way. My bags were packed and I was ready to go!

The two people driving the ‘ambulance’ spoke no English so it was a quiet journey for me. I was basically lying on a bed in the back of a van. I said I was more than happy to walk but they insisted (using hand gestures) that I get strapped onto a bed. There was no air con in there and it was boiling. France was entering into a heatwave and there were lots of warnings in the news about the upcoming high temperatures; excellent, something else to put in the mix. The journey was a bit sketchy, I was facing out towards the back of the van so could see all of the near misses as cars braked and swerved around the place in the evening rush hour traffic.

Not that I had really been in my comfort zone for the last couple of days, but as I arrived at Nantes University Hospital I felt very firmly out of it. I was no longer in my lovely brand new room with the nurses who were being so kind to me, popping in all of the time to see if I was ok, trying their best to make sure we could understand each other. I was on my own and in the hands of this pair, hoping they were going to get me to my son. The hospital seemed huge, I was wheeled around, in and out of lifts, I watched them talk to nurses, handed over my ID at one point, then was told on Google translate “we will install you in your room number 324 on the 3rd floor and after you will go see your baby” – I took a screen shot so I knew where I was. I was happy to make it to my new room but what next? I hung around and waited for someone to come in and see me to take me to Marty. I looked on Find My Friends to see how far I was away from Mark, Robyn and Jon. I took a fairly immediate dislike to my ward; it was old, huge, the nurses weren’t that nice, I could hear babies crying, the food was rank. 

Finally, at around 8pm I was taken upstairs to the neonatal ward to see Marty. Mark was putting Robyn to bed and would be with us as soon as he could (Robyn's bedtime was and is always a long process!). I was shown into a room with two incubators in, and pointed over to the right to Marty. It was really dark, full of machines, beeping, lights, charts and notes on the wall, some cute ‘Marty’ bunting on the notice board. There was a nurse with Marty, I had no idea what she was doing at the time but soon became familiar with their routines. It was really cramped in there, I felt in the way; both physically in the way and totally useless.

I didn’t know what to do with myself, I kept standing in different places, moving the two wheely stools around, I watched the nurse and we tried to communicate with each other. She unwrapped the blanket from him, and my t shirt; I saw his full body for the first time. He was so small, but totally perfect, his arms and legs were really skinny and he had crazy long fingers. The top of his one ear was a bit folded over like Marks, I don’t know if that was just coincidence but I liked it. He had a green tube in his nose, and then only a couple of thin wires attached to him, eyes closed, he just looked like he was asleep. There was a really small squid teddy that he always had with him; they called it a ‘nounours’ and I later noticed they often wrapped his fingers around it or used it to cover the tube going into his nose. I was glad he looked comfortable and there wasn’t too much visible interference with his body, but the surrounding machines left me in doubt of the situation we were in.

The nurse was so gentle with him, every movement was slow, precise and rehearsed. She told me to always sanitise my hands, wait for a few minutes for the smell to go and then I could touch him. All this was pretty much through the medium of mime! I think I sanitised my hands about 15 times that evening, I didn’t want to do anything I shouldn’t. When the nurse had finished and left the room, I opened the incubator door and placed my hand on his chest. I said hi, said I was sorry for taking so long to get there, and that daddy was coming soon when his big sister was in bed.

It wasn’t long before Mark arrived. He appeared at the sliding door looking like he’d just run a marathon; sweaty from rushing to the hospital in the 30 degree evening heat and trying to navigate the hospital. He was just like me, not knowing what to do with himself. We both sat with Marty for a while and tried to think of things to say to him.

A doctor soon arrived, the one who had been messaging Mark. He was lovely and spoke really good English (excellent). He was very reassuring and kind, he told us that although Marty was in a very sensitive situation, he was doing pretty well. He even said that we would all be better off if we were at home with our family so we should think about how we could get Marty back to Cardiff in a couple of weeks. Wow. We were not expecting that, maybe he was going to be ok? The doctor held eye contact with me as he told me that I did nothing wrong, the infection was nothing I did or didn’t do. I was so glad to hear that, I had been wondering if I’d picked something up from the swimming pool but I tried to stop myself thinking that any of this was my fault; I knew that was a spiral I just couldn’t go down right now. He told us that Marty would know we were here, he would feel comforted by our voices and that we should touch and hold him as much as we could. We could hold him, again, not what I was expecting but they really encouraged it.

We regret this decision now but we opted not to get Marty out of the incubator that night. I wanted us to do it together and Mark really needed to get back to Robyn in case she woke up and went nuts at Uncle Jon. We said goodnight to him, and each other, and I went back to my room (once I found the ward and got through the locked doors, sigh).

Maybe things were going to be ok.

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