Everything about my discharge from the hospital seemed so unreal. Walking out of the hospital with a diaper bag that hadn’t been opened in two days. Looking back at the newly installed car seat with no baby inside of it. Worst of all? Opening the doors to our home empty-handed.

When it comes to my postpartum experience and whether I went through postpartum depression or anything of that nature is still a mystery to me. I didn’t have time for that. I spent the next two weeks as one of the first and last parents to leave the NICU on most days. Might I add, I was graced enough to have a HUGE milk supply, which considering my predicament at the time, seemed more like a curse than a blessing. I was pumping every two hours. Yes, every two hours. But, I was hopeful that soon enough she would be home and this agonizing routine we had going on would soon come to an end. If I could tell that version of myself anything, it would be to pace herself.

I felt like I was dreaming. It didn’t feel real. Looking back now, it’s still hard for me to believe a lot of what actually happened. To have been holding Hannah and watching her gradually turn different shades of blue will definitely always be engraved in the memories I have of being in the NICU. But my most traumatic experience there for sure has to be the time a resident doctor told me that there wasn’t any medical evidence on how a child is born with VACTERL association, that in most cases he said, it’s just bad luck. What a slap in the face. To be told that your child was here out of misfortune. I remember calmly walking over to the parent waiting room and just sobbing. There a NICU nurse found me after overhearing the conversation and met me with a piece of advice I would carry for the remainder of our year-long hospital stay. She reminded me that I was Hannah’s voice and that there was no greater advocate for her than me. If I could see that same nurse again, I would tell her thank you. Had it not been for this piece of advice and God’s grace, who knows if Hannah would have been able to see the light of day. The thing about it then, was I didn’t know how or what it meant to advocate for her. I had no clue what I was doing.

I recall, the very last medical rounds we had for Hannah in the NICU like it was yesterday. After examining her and checking out all the boxes that would keep her from going home, it had been found in an x-ray that Hannah had a TEF (Tracheoesophageal Fistula). This allowed for there to be communication between her windpipe and her esophagus which permitted any fluids that she was given to cross over to her lungs, causing her to aspirate. They told us that she would need to be transferred to another hospital because the medical team there didn’t have the necessary equipment to perform this surgery in the NICU. However, they reassured me that this was the last step. After this surgery, there would be no reason why she couldn’t go home if all went well.

They were so so wrong. Who could have known? Ironically the day Hannah turned one month old, the day of her surgery, that this day would be one of the last times we saw her breathe on her own.