Holly's Diary: Cuddles

Today was an amazing day for Matt and I. We got to have Holly out of the incubator and hold her properly for the first time. 10 whole days since she was born and I finally got to give my daughter a cuddle. “Amazing” doesn’t even come close to describing how it feels to hold her close to me and feel her little feet on my tummy and her tiny hands on my chest. I could feel every breath she took and every hiccup (yep, she got the hiccups just as she was put on my tummy – she always had these inside me too!) As well as being amazing it was also a very scary moment when the nurse (Karen) took the ventilation off her, even if it was only for a matter of seconds, and lifted her out the incubator for the first time since she was born, and placed her tiny body onto mine to have “kangaroo care”. Its called kangaroo care because it mimics what a mummy kangaroo would do with her baby in her pouch, its also sometimes called skin-to-skin contact and its beneficial for babies as well as being nice. It helps to regulate their heart rate and their breathing. Karen quickly tucked her up under my vest and let her snuggle into my body to keep warm. Apparently a mums body will automatically adjust its temperature to keep her baby warm, and true enough, as soon as Holly was cuddled onto my chest her temperature went to a perfect 37 degrees for the first time all day! Karen re-attached Holly’s ventilation tube and sorted her other tubes out and then pulled the curtain around Matt, Holly and me and left us to be alone together and enjoy this first moment of many, many more to come.

As soon as Holly was placed onto my chest her little hands started trying to grab hold of my skin and her little feet and legs moved into her favourite frog-like position, I could feel her toes feeling my tummy and when I leaned forward to give her little head a kiss she reached up and happened to touched my lip. She was then fascinated by what she had felt and kept out stretching her little fingers and feeling my mouth. It was something so simple but so lovely, and meant the world to me that some where in that amazing brain of hers she was curious as to what my lips were. Matt and I then heard her making a funny noise, so we asked the doctor to come and check she was ok, and she was sucking on her breathing tube…. so, so adorable! She was making a little sucking noise and moving her little chin up and down, we took a video of her doing this and you can play it at the bottom of the page (you will have to either turn your head or computer side ways as Matt isn’t quite as handy with a video camera as he is with computers!). Then, as her head lay against my chest, she fell asleep for the next 2 and half hours. It felt like heaven being able to have my baby girl fall asleep on me, it’s a moment I will never, ever forget.

I wouldn’t have put her back in the incubator for the whole night if it wasn’t for the fact that I’d left it as long as humanly possible before I had to express milk again (every 2-3 hours is a strict schedule! – and other mums will know how uncomfortable it gets if you leave it too long!!). How ever, it was time to take her back to her little make-shift womb, so Matt and I gave her as many kisses as we could fit in until Karen came and took her off the ventilator again and wriggled her out from underneath my vest and lay her back in her incubator, all tucked up and ready for some more sleep to help her grow big and strong.

Medically, she is much the same as she has been, she is going back up on her milk tonight so we hope that will turn out better than before (last time she was sick once in the night from having too much milk). She is sill on a tiny bit of insulin to help level her blood sugars and she is still on a ventilator to help her breathe. As we were leaving tonight though she was coming down on the amount of oxygen they were giving her, so hopefully by morning she will be improving with that. The doctor who did the rounds this morning said she could hear a murmur on her heart, which was upsetting as we thought that had gone as the previous 2 mornings they couldn’t hear it, but we’ll just have to wait and see what happens tomorrow. Also, they thought one of her lungs might be collapsing too much when she breathes, and this can affect how much co2 Holly is expelling, so they did an x-ray and decided that they need to re position her breathing tube that is in her lungs and that this should help with her oxygen and co2 levels. She is still stable and they are pleased with how she is progressing.

Thank you again for reading the story of our amazing daughter, please forward this on to any one you want to, the more people reading about our gorgeous Holly, the more wishes and payers there will be out there for her. We also have adverts on the blog, which have earned £2.19 in the few days the blog has been up, we will be donating all money raised by these adverts to the Newborns In Need charity, which funds the Neonatal until at Heartlands Hospital. With out them Holly would not be here today.