Love, Shelby

“Dear NICU Mama, You can be so grateful your baby is okay and also grieve a “normal birth.” It is okay to grieve all of the moments you didn’t get or pictures you couldn’t take. Your story is different than you thought it would be. 

It’s okay to be grateful that you made it through one of the hardest seasons of your life and also grieve what could have been. It’s okay to be grateful that your baby is alive and healthy and still be sad when you see the baby announcement you didn’t get to create with the cute signs and blankets. Your baby is not the only one that recovers from the NICU, mama.”

Love,
Shelby

More of Shelby + Henry’s NICU Journey:

“Our baby boy was born on September 19th at 1:08am. My nurse was trying to help me breastfeed about five hours later when she noticed a lot of bruising and marks on his skin called petechiae. The pediatrician ordered a complete blood count (CBC) test, and Henry’s platelets came back critically low. He was taken immediately to the NICU at the hospital where he was born, but he had to be transferred to a larger hospital across town because of the risk for a brain bleed. For the next eight days he underwent several tests, four platelet transfusions, and two IVIG transfusions. 

We watched his numbers roller coaster up and down everyday. On the sixth day his numbers were finally up to where they were supposed to be, but it’s hard to get excited about things when you’re so afraid they are going to drop again. Luckily they stayed up, and he was finally making platelets on his own. We just found out that Henry had neonatal alloimmune thrombocytopenia, which means my husband and I have different platelet types and my platelets were attacking Henry’s platelets. This gets worse with every pregnancy, so our sweet baby may end up being our only baby. We are so grateful that he is healthy and is so loved.”