The Cloud Club

I’m furiously working on Hank’s Hope, and the number that keeps running through my mind is 200.

200 is approximately how many L&D losses and NICU losses Christiana Hospital sees each year.  This number varies, of course, and it’s just a ballpark estimate, but it’s close.  Christiana is the largest hospital in the area- bigger than any in Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Washington, D.C.  It also has a level III NICU, meaning that it can handle the tiniest, sickest, most gestationally early babies.  All of these factors will drive up the number of high risk patients.

After I delivered Hank, I needed to recover.  The postnatal time in the hospital is not just for baby, but for mother, too.  I had a Cesarean delivery, and my body had a lot of healing to do.  The hospital staff was experienced enough with loss (sadly) that they put me in a special area of maternity to spend the next few days.  I was on a floor isolated from newborn cries and glowing but exhausted parents.  My floor mates were either post delivery mothers who had babies in the NICU, mothers who were still pregnant and on hospital mandated bedrest, or mothers like myself.  My floor was quiet and calm.  Not many visitors, or balloons and flowers, or happiness.  It was business as usual, every day.

To speed up my recovery, I’d walk around the floor.  I sometimes took pleasure in the sharp pains that would shoot through my abdomen when I pushed myself too far.  I’d keep going.  I wanted to feel something physical, even if it hurt.  I wanted to heal, yet punish myself.  I wanted my body to feel the ache that wrapped around my head and heart.  My loss had not yet fully hit me- it wouldn’t for months to come.  Putting one foot in front of the other, saying thank you to the nurses who told me they were sorry for my loss, and a steady diet of Percocet was all the reality I could handle.

As I walked, I’d stare at the big dry erase board of all the initials of the patients on my floor, and the checkmarks and codes written in little squares in the language that only nurses and doctors could understand.  I’d find A.M./Picazo (my wonderful obstetrician) on the board each day and see if there were new X’s or slashes or anything next to my name.  On the second day, I noticed a sticker next to my initial.  It was a circular sticker, with a light blue background.  Fluffy cartoon clouds covered most of it.  It took me a few seconds to realize what it was for, and then my stomach dropped.

The cloud was to let the staff know that I was a bereaved mother.

There was also a cloud sticker on the door to my room.  I think I took a picture of the cloud sticker, but I don’t have it anymore.  Maybe I didn’t actually take a picture, but I can see it very clearly in my mind.  The cloud club, and I’m a member.  And there were probably about 199 others in 2012.  I know some of them personally now.  Some have gone on to have healthy babies, myself included.  Some have had more losses.  Some can’t even try again because not only did they lose their baby but complications were so great that they either lost the physical ability to conceive or carry a child.  Some were told that if they try again, their own lives will be so much in danger that preventative pregnancy measures must be taken.

Even though I’m a cloud club member, I’m one of the lucky ones.  That cloud sticker has given me a purpose, and a dream that was slowly and is now quickly manifesting itself into a reality.  The awful truth of the cloud club for me is that I have a daughter that wouldn’t be here had I not endured the death of her brother.  It’s the terrible and bittersweet way life in the club works.

Someday in my lifetime, cloud stickers may not be a line item in the procurement department’s system at Christiana Hospital, or any other hospital.  One can only hope that this will be another dream that becomes reality.