Act Two

If every day in the NICU passed like a week, since Asher's been home, the week has flown like a day.

Did you know babies are a lot of work? It's something I knew and accepted before Asher, but didn't fully understand why it was so. Now that we, not a team of nurses, are in charge of his round the clock care, he fills our entire day.  Especially with Marissa still pumping, even the times he's sleeping are spent cleaning the house, scrubbing his bottles and pumping gear, and trying to fit in all the old household jobs on top of that.

Asher's naps are also spent by us in a combination of relief and terror. We slink around the house like we're trying to evade a deranged murderer, knowing that one creaky floorboard, one stub of the toe could mean our demise.  Decisions to risk picking up his sleeping body make me feel like Indiana Jones stealing treasure at the risk of being crushed by a boulder.

He likes being outside.  We spent hours outside at a party for our friends Will and Katy, who are due in July, and Asher was calm and happy the entire time.  It helped that there was a deck full of people wanting to hold and talk to him (though this picture somehow makes it look like we ditched him).

He's a popular dude, and had a few visitors this week, including a turkey sandwich from Katy that apparently saved Marissa's life.

Asher had a few medical appointments this week.  We met with the feeding team, and were able to tell them about some small successes with breastfeeding.  He'll latch on and suck at times, once taking most of a feeding that way with the help of our childbirth educator, the "Queen of Latch".  That's been an up and down struggle, but feeding has not been a problem, as the team observed.

We also met with his pediatrician, three days after coming home. This is the family doctor we feel very grateful for, who attended a meeting that nurses said they'd never seen a family doctor attend.  Not having seen Asher in two weeks, he looked at Asher and us with a real happiness for what he saw.  We'll treat him like the normal baby he's behaving like until he gives us reason not to, said the doctor.

This was the first of multiple times this week when the "m" word was offered up.  I can't think of anything I'd experienced in my life that qualifies as miraculous.  We've all heard stories of people beating long odds, but I've never had long odds to beat.  To tell the truth, my life has been pretty easy up until now.  I'm a white, middle class male in the US of A.  Miracles have not been required.  In his short life, Asher has done something most will never have the need - or the opportunity - to do.  It seems like he's fought back from the dead.

At the same time, that fight has begun to fade from my consciousness, stored away as something irrelevant to our lives now.  In just a week, it's become so distant.  Did that really happen?  Looking at Asher today, you'd never know what he's been through.  His doctor told us that any differences in him from other babies were so minimal they weren't worth mentioning. 

Though this feels and sounds like a happy ending to Asher's story, that's not exactly the case.  This week marks the beginning of the second act, one that will play out on a timeline much longer than the first.  We won't know what, if any, consequences he'll have from the hypoxia until he begins to pass developmental milestones like walking and talking.  Coming home is not a happy ending, but it is happy.