“How my premature delivery changed my life”

“Physically, I had a near perfect start to my pregnancy. Other than a craving UHT milk, the initial months were uneventful. I had minimal morning sickness and I reached my pregnancy milestones in time. Mine was the pregnancy a lot of women hope to have.

“Emotionally though, I was a bundle of nerves. My boyfriend had gone quiet on me soon after I found out that I was pregnancy. Being a 24-year-old first time mother, I worried about everything. I worried about the pregnancy, the kind of mother I was going to become but mostly, I worried about money.

“I had a job as a sales and reservations agent for a local airline and while it served me well at the time, I wasn’t sure that my pay would be enough with the coming of the new baby. I worried about looking like I was failing at parenting even before I had begun. At one point, I even took a loan to shop for baby stuff. I wanted to give my baby the very best.

“Then in February 2014, at 28 weeks of pregnancy, my physical health took a turn. I started having headaches that just wouldn’t go away. At the hospital, I was diagnosed with typhoid and given medication. Seeing as the headache was the only symptom, I was not convinced by the diagnosis so I sought a second opinion. The nurse who saw me at the second hospital wondered how I had gotten there by myself as my blood pressure was very high. This came as a surprise for me seeing as there is no history of blood pressure in my family.

“Because of the high blood pressure, I was told that I couldn’t carry the pregnancy to term as there was the risk both of us would not survive it. I was admitted that same day and scheduled for an emergency Caesarean section.

TINY BABY

“Baby Dylan was just 1.4kg when I had him. I remember thinking how he was the size of a small thermos flask when I first saw him in the incubator. With the Caesarean birth came my first challenge – breastfeeding. Because he was so small, he would use up all his energy which he needed to grow if he breastfed. This meant that I had to extract this milk myself which he would then be fed through tubes. It was hard getting the 5ml he needed at each meal. I even developed black spots on my breasts trying to express milk.

“The nine days he was in the incubator were tough on me. Interestingly, it was seeing mothers whose babies were born even earlier that made me stronger. I remember a mother losing her baby girl who she had given birth to at 20 weeks and willing that Dylan would fight harder. He did.

“Two weeks in, Dylan had added some weight and was now 1.7kg. We were discharged from the hospital on condition that we wouldn’t have any visitors. He was still too underweight to get the BCG vaccination that is given at birth, so having visitors may have led to him catching infections. Luckily for us, I had moved back in with my parents when I was pregnant so even though we couldn’t have visitors, my mother provided adequate support.

“I don’t know when I slipped into post-partum depression. I remember being constantly anxious and feeling helpless. I knew that something was terribly wrong when on one night when two-month-old Dylan wouldn’t stop crying, thoughts of harming him crossed my mind. It was a very terrifying place to be.

“Talking about what I was feeling was my first step out of it. My baby shower which happened after the baby was born was the other thing that pulled me out of it. At the shower, my friends who had children candidly shared their experiences and I realised that my situation, being a single mother and having a premature birth, wasn’t alien. That these things happen.

“Now, at three years and eight months old, Dylan is a ball of energy. Sometimes it is hard for me to picture him lying helpless in that incubator. I would want to have other children in the future but the helplessness I felt when he was born still scares me.

“Every mother wants to have a normal delivery so a lot of mothers who have premature births are unprepared for it. There is also a lot of misinformation out there about it. I come across women, especially online, wondering if there is something wrong with them because their babies were born too early.

“I wish that women would stop blaming themselves for premature births. Understand that it could happen to anyone. If I could do this all over again, I would worry less about things I have no control over and just enjoy being pregnant.

“For that woman who is just about to, or who just had a premature birth, I say take it in your stride. It will sap the energy right out of you but if you have a good support system like the one I had, it will be alright.”