What happens in the special care nursery...

               

This video is just a few short clips of Andrew and Joel during their 17 day stay in the special care nursery after they were born. I had to sit down this afternoon and have Hannah refresh my memories about those days because although it was only two and a half weeks, it felt like it lasted for months.

                Andrew and Joel could not keep their temperatures regulated, so they were put in incubators. I still don’t know why, but Joel couldn’t eat at all for the first two days. He was unable to nurse or eat from a bottle, so eventually he had a feeding tube put in. They allowed Hannah and me to feed him several times which only consisted of pushing 5ml of breast milk through a syringe. Joel’s body was so underdeveloped that 2 hours later at the next feeding they would extract the same 5ml we had put in at the last feeding. His body couldn’t digest. They put an IV in his leg, but he quickly kicked it out so they went to an IV in his head. They spent most of their days with little cloth blinders on to protect their eyes from the lights swaddled up in their blankets inside the incubators. For a while it seemed like Andrew was going to be able to go home with us pretty soon, but after a day or so he was no longer able to hold his temperature or feed on his own.         

The hospital would only let Hannah stay there for two days, after that we were given the option of staying in a special family room at the hospital but at $45 a night it was out of reach for us financially. Rather than driving 45 minutes to an hour each day we decided Hannah would stay at her grandmother’s house. Although the distance was shorter the drive time turned out to be the same. Several times traffic and extenuating circumstances forced Hannah to miss their feeding times. Those were the only opportunities we were given to hold the boys, so you can imagine how hard it was for her.

I had to return to work, so I stayed at home with Caleb and made the trip to the hospital as often as possible. To make matters more interesting our youth mission trip was scheduled for the middle week of the boys hospital stay. While my wife was staying at her grandmother’s house and my newborn twin boys were still in the hospital I packed up about 70 teenagers and drove them across the state for a week of ministry. We had other adults and church staff on the trip but I had overseen the planning and organization of the entire trip so I had to go for the first few days to ensure things were going to go smoothly. After we were sure everything was in order I drove back home to spend a few days with Hannah and the boys. Those two or three days in the middle of that week were so precious to me. I didn’t know how to feel when I would stand there looking at my little boys there behind the glass. There was a lot of hope in me during that time, but I felt completely powerless. There was nothing I could do to help them. There was nothing I could do to help Hannah. I knew that she was experiencing things much more deeply than I was and I felt that simply being there wasn’t enough, but it was my only choice and sometimes even that was taken away from me. We got to know all of the other parents with children in the nursery and there was a real sense of family there as we shared one another’s victories and tragedies. As it neared the end of the mission week I needed to return to the trip to help with final logistics and travel home. Hannah was once again left alone. She told me the other day that she remembers one day seeing our pastor walk down the hall at the hospital and wanting to just run up and hug him. It wasn’t that we were that (awkwardly) close with him, but she just felt so alone. He was the only one who had come to visit and she was just grateful to see a familiar face.

While I was trying to manage several dozen teenagers and adults on a stressful week of mission work we started to face the inevitable drama of teenage-dom. The details aren’t important but there were students and parents and sponsors all behaving in a manor befitting a toddler. After a particularly heated encounter I sat down with my brother-in-law and just griped about how stupid it was that in the middle of all we were going through I was the one expected to settle the petty disputes and counsel those going through hard times. Not to mention that the other adults were always so quick to point out the fact that I was little more than a kid myself, and yet I was the one who had to grow up and settle their issues. I honestly believe that time frame was where the very first seeds of bitter loneliness were sown in Hannah and me. It felt like we were having our world stretched in every imaginable way and everyone around us was content to obsess over their own lives. Caleb was with me for that trip and I know a parent should never say this, but he was my savior and sanity for a season. Hanging out with that kid brought me such complete joy that it helped to dull my senses to everything I felt was falling down around me.

                The week finally ended and we took all the teenage maniacs back home. Hannah and I settled in for an undetermined schedule of back and forth to the hospital and work and church and home while we waited for the boys to meet all the requirements to finally come home. In the end it took much less time than it could have. It was hard not to feel guilty watching our boys start to come through into health and see the other families who had been there longer suffer their tragedies. We were slowly allowed to spend more and more time with the boys until finally on June 28^th, 2004 we were allowed to take Andrew and Joel home to be a complete family.