Day 8 - Trauma

Day 8 - Has anything traumatic every happened to you? Describe the scenes surrounding a particular event.

I can't remember any major traumatic issues in my life. There have been not so fun emergencies, like stepping on a nail when I was a kid (and it almost going all the way through my foot), passing out while newly pregnant and requiring immediate medical attention, and having my newborn baby sick in the hospital.

The worse for Matt and I both was having Zachariah go to the special care nursery shortly after his birth. He had an infection that showed more a few hours after he was born, which earned him a trip out of my room and into the special care nursery (where he stayed for a week). There was a lack of communication from the nurses to us and it had us worried. Really the whole week-long stay was like that. We would get conflicting information from one nurse to another. It was very annoying.

We saw this happen all over again (it was gut-wrenching) when my sister-in-law delivered her first baby. Like Zachariah he was taken to the special care nursery shortly after birth for an infection (in the same hospital). It was difficult to see, but we offered as much support as we could to them while he was in there. Matt was traumatized seeing our nephew in the same situation as our own son. In fact when his sister had her second baby, he said if she ends up in special care too I don't want to have any more babies. (Lucky for me little Grace was born perfectly healthy.)

In the grand scheme of things none of this made any difference. Zachariah is a healthy, thriving boy (and so is our nephew). In fact he's healthier than most kids his age. But that moment was one of the hardest of our lives. Ad yes, it does make us wonder if it would happen again for another child. Let's pray it doesn't.