Pregnancy Journal

Arianne had been preparing for pregnancy, birth, and motherhood her whole life.  I wouldn’t call her an expert, but she definitely knows her stuff!  She was my rock during our stay at the NICU – I often needed things clarified and dumbed down after a nurse or doctor gave us a report.  Arianne understood most of it and was able to fill me in, because she educated herself over the years through reading, classes, and hours of watching the baby shows on TLC and Discovery Health.  So she felt confident enough to hold a conversation with experts.

Arianne and I were still feeling uncomfortable around the nurses, still not feeling like we were in charge of our daughters.  But we still wished to have a positive relationship with the staff.  One Sunday in March (I think), Ari and I were standing at Julia’s isolette, and Ari started to make conversation with the nurses on duty, including the girls’ nurse (let’s just call her Flo).  She asked them general questions about the NICU.  They discussed the facility’s capabilities, the history, the staff’s vast experiences.  The conversation then turned to the NICU’s possible limitations.  Arianne heard from a friend that the Alexandria NICU was a Level II and George Washington was a Level III NICU.  Wanting to be friendly and try to develop a closer relationship with our nurse, Arianne asked her what the levels meant; what made George Washington a Level III and Alexandria a Level II?  This turned out to be a huge mistake.

At Arianne’s question with the implication that Alexandria was a Level II, the two of us felt immediately under attack (even though I was looking in on Julia and wasn’t listening to the conversation at all, I instantly felt the climate change behind me).  Flo’s tone changed when she snapped defensively, “Oh, we ARE a Level III NICU,” as if Arianne offended her personally.  Ari started to back up and say that she was told that it was a Level II and that was why she was asking, but it was too late.  Another nurse (Barbara) had overheard Arianne’s blasphemous comment and inserted herself into the fray.  “Yeah, I don’t know who told you that, but this is a Level III NICU.  I’m pretty sure we’ve always been a Level III.”  At this point, Barbara turned to another nurse to clarify that fact.  But this nurse wasn’t a few feet away.  Barbara had turned and yelled across the NICU to the opposite end, “Kathy, how long have we been a Level III NICU?!”  To which Kathy yelled back over a handful of isolettes, “As long as I’ve worked here!  It’s always been a Level III NICU, it was never a Level II!”  Arianne kept trying to chime in and defuse the situation.  But alas.

I had turned around at this point and watched with amazement at the fire in the nurses’ eyes.  You’d think that Arianne just threatened to cut their salaries (along with their NICU’s precious status).  And it kept going and going.  I made a few attempts at changing the subject, or to clarify what Arianne was trying to say.  But it was no good.  The nurses did everything except pull out literature to prove that the NICU was a Level III.  Naturally (for me), with my warped mind, I started to picture just how far the situation COULD have gone.  And I shared my thoughts with Arianne on our walk out of the hospital.

I pictured Flo storming over to the nearest phone and dialing furiously.  She’d cradle the phone under her chin, with her arms crossed and foot incessantly tapping.  Finally, the other end picked up and she’d say, “Get up here now, we have a Code Purple!”  In a matter of seconds, the doors will be thrust open so hard that they’d fall off the hinges.  All of the doctors will come marching in, dressed in scrubs, clearly just walked out of a pretty serious procedure, and they’d glare around, barking, “Who did it?  Who challenged the Level status of this NICU??”  The nurses will all point with glee at Arianne and I, backed into a corner of ridicule and shame.  Suddenly, the air vents in the ceiling will be blown out with explosives and SWAT team members will rappel down and swarm the NICU to prevent any escape attempt by the blasphemers.  With their How-Dare-You weapons pointed at the ready, the entire group will suddenly stop shouting obscenities at us and they will part like the Red Sea.  But it’s not Moses who has a beef – it’s Stephen Hawking.  He wheels up to us and electronically explains that his numerous theories prove that since the dawn of space and time, Alexandria has been a Level III NICU, and it was in this very NICU that the universe was born and cared for, as this is the only NICU in the history life that could handle such a patient as the universe.

Arianne and I laughed about this on the way home, sharing more and more silly scenarios with each other.  But no matter how outlandish our visions got, nothing could top the ridiculous reality of what we had just experienced.  We simply shook our heads and shook off so much of the ugly that had infected our souls.  And we came to a cathartic moment.  As stressed as we got about our dealings with the NICU, with the boneheaded practices, the domineering staff, the inept management, no amount of stress can possibly compare with what those poor nurses felt at Arianne’s classic, insensitive mistake*.

*One month after this, just a few days before Marayla’s discharge, a strong-willed contract nurse (not employed directly by the hospital) just happened to broach the topic, and offered the following:  “This is just a Level Two NICU.”  If she had been there on that day, I’m pretty sure all of you would have heard about The NICU Brawl on national news, seeing as it truly is a Level III.  Ooops.

Epilogue

Arianne and I were still reeling from that experience on the drive home.  We’d laugh about it to the point of tears, drift into a comfortable silence at a traffic light, then burst into laughter again.  We could not get past how silly it was!  Still, business had to be tended to and we needed to stock up on some food.  We stopped at a Trader Joe’s a few miles away from the hospital.  Arianne wanted to go to there because she had never been to that particular store; in fact, she had never seen this store before and believed it to be brand new.  

We did our shopping and got on line.  The store was incredibly busy and chaotic.  It’s a great store, but when it’s packed, it’s pretty crazy and cramped – I couldn’t wait to get out and get home.  We finally reached the front of the line, and were just about done with checking out.  Arianne being the Arianne she is, just had to ask, she had to satisfy her curiosity.  She asked the clerk (let’s call him Rudy), “How long has this store been open?”  Rudy, clearly dumbfounded by the totally random question, looked at Arianne with a blank stare (I quickly swiped my credit card to keep the momentum going).  He then responded, “Um, we’ve been here awhile, a few years I think.”  Come on people, you know what happened next.

Rudy looked over his shoulder and asked the clerk at the next register (let’s call her Maureen), “Hey Mo, how long has this store been open?”  Maureen, just like her pal Rudy, said, “Um, I think we’ve been open for a few years, but I’m not sure.”  Maureen then kept the game of telephone going, and asked the next clerk.  And it continued all the way down the line, from one clerk to the next!  I just watched it all happen with my jaw resting on the market floor; I then turned to my wife to be sure that she was on the same page as me.  Arianne was beet red and trying to catch her breath from laughing so hard.  I could only shake my head in disbelief.  Only one hour after the NICU fiasco, Arianne started another flash fire.  Floor clerks and other random employees were asked the question as they walked by, and they took the question to someone who might know.  Even though the store was slammed, the Trader Joe’s staff had thrown Arianne’s simple question to the top of their priorities and commissioned an entire investigation team to find the answer.  Naturally, it went all the way to the manager, who apparently dropped whatever he was doing to come to our check-out line and provided us, finally, with the answer.  The store had been open for years.  Arianne just never noticed it. 

This actually happened.

After days went by with no discussion with the doctor, we decided to go another route.  GrandMarmy suggested that we contact the hospital patient advocate, an impartial person with influence.  I loved this idea, because it would handle our concerns with anonymity.  We wanted to avoid alerting the NICU staff that, “Arianne and Ryan are unhappy!”  If the patient advocate could provide solutions in an anonymous manner, then that was the best way.  So, Arianne called the patient advocate and left a message with a request to return the call.  We felt truly confident that things were about to start swinging in our favor with this issue.  I mean, if the hospital has a patient advocate, that must mean that situations such as this arise often enough to warrant the position’s existence.  Therefore, the person must know what they’re doing.  What could possibly go wrong?

Later that day, we were at the NICU, Arianne was with Marayla and I was Julia.  I was sitting in a rocking chair behind a screen for privacy, with Julia on my chest when there was a knock on the screen.  The knocker was a familiar face, a woman I always thought to be a NICU nurse (even though she was never assigned to care for the girls).  She was there almost every day.  She was there during the Valentine’s Day award ceremony, joining in the celebration.  She was certainly good friends with most if not all of the nurses.  Turns out, she was the NICU Manager, the head nurse.

She told me that she just got off the phone with the patient advocate, and she wanted to let me know that if Ari and I had any issues or concerns to please come talk with her so she could address them.  She was very kind and sincere when she said this.  Clearly, she did not hear the blaring screams coming from inside my head.  I nodded and thanked her as she left and closed the screen behind her.  I was livid.  Arianne definitely requested to speak directly with the patient advocate, and only the advocate.  Granted, she did call and leave a message with Arianne that day; seeing as we never answered our cell phones in the NICU (remember, not allowed), we didn’t receive her message until after she spoke with the head nurse.  But apparently, when the patient advocate was unable to reach us, she immediately called the NICU manager directly to let her know that specific parents of two babies in her department may be dissatisfied with the care.  All this did was establish the NICU Manager, friend to all, as our new point of contact for our problems - a manager who was just as accountable as anyone else.  After all of our efforts to keep our complaints in secrecy, the one person who is charged with patient advocacy and anonymity blew it wide open.  With all of our options eliminated, we felt more stuck than ever.

As things continued to get more difficult with the nurses and management, we briefly toyed with the idea of going even higher, all the way to hospital executives.  But that was also short-lived, seeing as it was the hospital president that was at the center of the Valentine’s Day ceremony.  And there were many trying days, when we were at the end of our rope, when I would walk by the NICU manager’s office, so tempted to storm in there and unleash the beast.  But I always kept myself in check.  Ari and I had pretty much given up on getting help from anyone in hospital management.  We felt defeated, and we were just focused on managing our girls’ care for ourselves.  Managing them out of the NICU. 

Ryan was in South Carolina this past week for work.  I had been dreading it since he first told me that he had to go.  I got myself all worked up for fear of being alone.  Mostly I was scared of being alone at night.  But I realized that I needed to be able to be on my own and not burden Ryan and myself with worries.  Turns out I had no reason to be worried at all.

On top of being alone with Julia and Marayla for six days, I was also dog-sitting the very emotional Nana, GrandMarmy and GrandDude's dog Candy (Nana is a name I coined based on the dog in the Disney movie Peter Pan, because Candy was so protective of the girls when they first came home from the NICU).  She has stayed with us before, but she became very depressed, stopped eating, and was throwing up by the end of that stay.  This time around, Nana did so well.  She arrived a few days before Ryan’s departure on Sunday.  She settled in, ate most of her food, and spent her time hanging out with the girls (her Mom and Dad were away in North Carolina on a business and family trip, seeing my Mom's brother Bryan and his family). 

I was alone for only one day before my Mom returned from her trip and stayed with me and the girls through Thursday morning, a great surprise and a HUGE relief!  GrandMarmy, Nana, Julia, Marayla, and I had so much fun together, just hanging out and making each other laugh with our silly antics. 

Marayla learned to say Nana and said it hundreds of times every day when she saw Candy.  She has the most precious voice and it was so cute to hear her make that connection.

Julia was obsessed with my Mom's reading glasses and practically hyperventilated every time my Mom put them on; her reaction sent us into hysterical laughter. 

Because the girls always want my Mom's and my undivided attention, we gave them our cell phones to play with so we could get stuff done.  Naturally, they managed to access all kinds of settings and features in our phones.  Marayla has developed a talent for accidentally (or intentionally!) prank calling random people in my phone address books.  The funniest scene, though, was watching them chase each other around the room trying to steal the other’s phone.  My Mom’s phone is much newer, cooler, and prettier than mine, and Marayla had that one…for awhile.  Julia wanted to take it from her.  So, Marayla curled the phone under her arm and used her other arm to scoot her butt along the length of the kitchen floor, constantly looking over her shoulder to check on her pursuer.  Julia was super serious about getting that phone, and Marayla, who couldn’t out scoot her walking sister, whined the whole time she tried to protect her precious phone.  I was following them around the kitchen, laughing hysterically at the scene and how serious they were about their phones.  Eventually, Julia simply took it from her, and Marayla looked up at me with such a devastated look on her face before collapsing in hysterics.

My Mom let me sleep in most mornings, my favorite time to sleep.  However, one morning my slumber was interrupted by the high-pitched beeping of our house alarm.  My Mom accidentally set off the alarm, and was unable to disarm it.  So I jumped out of bed and ran down the stairs to disarm the alarm in time.  As I ran, I whisper-yelled (sleeping babies) the code down to my Mom so she could enter it in.  In the end, I entered the code, but our service had to verify that all was well.  My Mom was insistent that she entered the correct code a bunch of times when I was yelling it down to her; and she said she pushed the same buttons that I did and she showed me which ones she pushed.  When I told her that was the wrong code, without missing a beat, she dead-panned, “Oh, I didn’t have my glasses on.”

Early Thursday morning, GrandMarmy and Nana had to go home, much to the BTs’ dismay.  I took Julia and Marayla to playgroup and to a friend’s house to play with our twin friends.  It was a great week for all us girls.  I guess we tend to build things up in our minds and psych ourselves out, but when we actually experience them firsthand, they end up not being so bad.  Sure, I was a little bit freaked out on Thursday night (no GrandMarmy or Nana to back me up!).  Ryan’s plane was delayed on Friday evening, and then late that night my spider catcher*, husband, returned home, and when we hugged I realized how much I had missed him, not for the parental support but just for him.

*A very very large hairy scary spider and I had a run in on Friday night.  I finally trapped him in a plastic cup and left him for Ryan to dispose of.  I was feeling creepy crawlies all over my body for the rest of the night!  While researching spiders on the Internet, I was talking to my Mom with my phone crooked on my shoulder so I could type with both hands.  Suddenly I felt a four-pound spider crawling up my arm!  I shrieked, threw the phone down, and moved to brush the spider away.  Turns out, it was just my hair brushing against my arm, hair that wouldn’t have touched my arm at all if I hadn’t been researching very very large hairy scary spiders in the first place.  Go figure, I carried on as normal all week, and it takes just one creepy spider with five minutes until Ryan’s return to freak me out!

Ryan’s PostScript:  One of my favorite things in the world is when Arianne and her Mom get caught up in some sort of ridiculous scenario that results in both of them laughing uncontrollably, in their identical high-pitched laughing-while-talking way.  This happens often enough, which is always fun for me as a witness (we could start a whole new journal about the exploits of Arianne and her Mom!).  Ever since the day Arianne learned that we were having daughters, I’ve been looking forward to that day when I stumble upon a scene in which GrandMarmy, Arianne, and Julia and/or Marayla are all laughing together like that.  Arianne recounting the stories of this past week to me just laid the groundwork that that day is sure to come.

Julia's new saying is uh-oh.  I noticed she was saying it the other day and so, of course, I started dropping and hiding things and saying it all the time because I think it is so cute when kids say that.  My Mom was playing all kinds of uh-oh games with her this week and now she is the queen of uh-oh.  Ryan and I even woke to her saying it in the middle of the night; she dropped her baby and said, "Uh-oh baba" (their baba's have rattles inside their bodies so we always know when one was thrown or stolen).  I was cracking up!

She has also started using a long phrase that I could never recreate with my language skills, but it basically means she wants something.  She will use this phrase when she wants to get on their rocking horse, or for us to read her a book ,or when she wants to be held.  We are going to try and get her to say this on a video since she changes and develops so quickly she may not be saying this hysterically, adorable phrase for much longer.

Julia can also say clock, ball, cat, roar, woof woof and quack and can identify many animals and foods too.  Yesterday I asked her to get me a bowl and she walked over and brought it right to me. Everyday they do or say something new and I am in awe of where they started in life to where they are now!