Journey... Bringing home Aiden

Aiden was put on an IV of sucrose right when he was born because his blood sugar was really low (20). His doctor expected his sugar levels to regulate pretty quickly with the sucrose, but it did not. She believed something else must be wrong. Over Monday & Tuesday Aiden went through many tests, and finally on Tuesday afternoon the doctor confirmed there was something wrong. Both of his lungs were filled with pneumonia. What happened after this was a whirlwind. He had to be transferred to the nearest NICU, which was two hours away. I asked if we'd be driving him, and they said that no, a transport team would come and get him and he would go in the ambulance with them. I think this was when it really hit me. My baby was very sick.

They had to bring him to the nursery to be on oxygen while we waited for the transport team to get there. Dave and I took turns rocking Aiden in the nursery during those two hours. We packed up all of our stuff, and I got to be discharged early. I believe we went through an entire box of Kleenex during those couple hours. I couldn't stop crying. My baby was sick and there wasn't a thing I could do for him. When the transport team arrived and I saw the little tiny incubator on this huge gurney with all of these machines hooked up... That was even worse. We stayed there until they rolled him out of the nursery, then took off as fast as we could. We went home, threw a bunch of things in bags and drove two hours to go see our precious baby.

Initially they told us 7-10 days. We focused on the seven. Within a couple of days they said it would be ten days. Then fourteen. By this point we didn't really believe it, couldn't expect anything, and stopped looking at the calendar. We would be there as long as it took for Aiden to be healthy and ready to come home. It ended up being 16 days. Every day there felt just like the day before. We spent all day with Aiden, caring for him as much as we could. The first few days we couldn't even hold him. I can't even describe the feeling of standing next to your brand new baby, he's crying and agitated and you can't pick him up. Three days into his stay at the NICU we were finally able to hold him again. Needless to say, we held him as much as possible over the rest of our time there. 

Today Aiden is a healthy 2 month old baby. He's eating and growing and doing everything a 2 month old should do. We are thankful every day.