Thank you!

Thanks for all of your prayers. I'm so tired, prayer is the only thing that is keeping me upright right now!

Right now, things are going great for the baby. She had another great night. Hopefully, she'll be able to come home on Friday morning.

Almost Home

Hello, this is Jon, Abby's husband, filling in tonight. Tess was transported by ambulance to Holy Cross Hospital Pediatrics. All six of us were together for the first time in 3 weeks. The good news is she might come home as early as Friday! Although, you never can tell with hospitals. Abby is spending the night with Tess tonight and I am home with the other kids. Tomorrow should be interesting.

Moving Baby Tess

Baby Tess had another amazing day! I just finished breast feeding her for the first time since her surgery. She's super alert and social. The nurses were shocked that she already knows how to smile.

Tonight is our last night in the NICU. Tomorrow she is getting transfered back to the hospital where she was born. She'll be on a regular pediatric floor. Hopefully, Baby Tess is now on "cruise control." Her only reason to still be in the hospital is for her to finish the antibiotic treatment for her blood infection. She should be ready to come home on September 28th.

The new hospital is much closer to home. They allow siblings to visit anytime. Unlike the NICU, you can watch TV, make telephone calls and eat inside the patients room. A parent is also allowed to spend the night. I'm looking forward to a much easier hospital stay for another week.

Many thanks for your prayers for Tess and me. I had a mericful intervention by Jesus this afternoon which kept me out of trouble.

More Prayers Please

Baby Tess is doing great! Me, the Mama, not so well.

Tess went from drinking 5 mL of milk to 55-70 mL each feeding. She's stooling up a storm. She's now a totally normal, happy, alert newborn who is getting life-saving drugs through an IV in her leg.

Tess has improved so much that they are moving her out of the NICU and into a less intensive hospital setting for the next nine days. I'm waiting on my insurance company to approve her transfer. She could be moved to one of four different hospitals tonight.

I'm a little tense today waiting for my baby's next assignment and I'm falling into the sin easily. Please pray for me!

The Best News

She pooped! At 12:45 AM the nurse reported the "poop of all poops" came out of little Tess. Praise God, my baby is on her way home from the NICU!

To add shivers down your spine, today is the 1 year anniversary of my Father-in-law's death. (To new blog readers, last year on this exact date my husband lost his father less than 12 weeks after his first cancer diagnosis. We've waited for this conclusive sign of Tessie's healing from abdominal surgery for over 12 days now. Thanks Dad!)

Hurrah!

Wow, what a difference one day on real food can make.

Together, Jon and I spent 7 hours with Baby Tess today. The doctors put her status up to "on demand" for feedings. She gets as much breast milk as she wants, anytime that she wants. I slammed milk down that hungry baby all day. She's up to drinking 1 ounce every 3 hours, which is awesome. That is just about a normal feeding schedule for her age and weight.

The doctor even gave me permission to alternate bottle feedings with actual breastfeeding sessions. Tess and I tried this afternoon and it didn't work. I told myself not to get discouraged, however. I'm sure once we get her eating regularly and actually "hungry" between feedings, she'll be more willing to work a little bit harder for her dinner. One thing at a time.

She looks so much more like a normal baby. The crazy IV is off of her head. The yucky NG tube is out of her nose. Right now, she's a regular baby who just has one IV in her foot and some heart monitors on her chest.

Because Tess didn't look "all scary" today, Hannah wanted to hold her baby Sister. They looked so cute together.

Tess has recovered enough to start to be a demanding, normal newborn. (One of the sad things about the NICU is most babies are so sick they don't cry. NICU babies are almost completely silent and still. So a robust newborn doing normal newborn stuff is totally unusual.)

Tess is now making lots of friends with the nursing staff. Each nurse only has two babies per 12 hour shift. But if Tess' nurse is busy with her other charge, another nurse will have to help entertain our demanding Tess. Three nurses told me today that Tess will cry just to get someone in the room with her. She doesn't need a diaper change, or her pacifier. As soon as a face appears over her crib railing, she's totally happy. The nurses have concluded that our Tess just wants company! I laughed and said that sounded like a fourth child, a baby who never wants to be left alone for long.

We are still waiting for the "big poop." I'm not going to feel completely easy about the success of her surgery until that happens.

Meanwhile, it's awesome to watch all the kind nurses cheering to get Tess out of their NICU and into our home.

Big News

I fed Tess from a bottle tonight!

It was amazing. It was only a teaspoon of breastmilk, but Baby Tess gulped it down in a flash. Then she fell asleep happily on my chest. Heaven!

Please keep up the prayers. The feeding schedule is super long- like 2 to 3 weeks before she'll be ingesting enough milk to keep up her weight and get home. That seems like an impossibly long time to wait. I hope I grow in the virtue of patience soon.

Falling in Love Under Difficult Circumstances

Having to put a brand-new baby into Intensive Care for the first few weeks of her life pretty much fit my view of a nightmare scenario.

Johnny and I had gotten ourselves into a parenting pattern by Baby Number Four. We started parenting our first child as granola crunching post-grad students. We adopted the "attachment parenting" formula all the way. Each of my first three babies got swaddled, held, carried, exclusively breastfed, co-slept and gently, gently moved into a crib at eight months of age.

Baby Tess neatly fit into our established parenting pattern until day six of her young life, when we suddenly had to hand over our desperately ill baby girl to a gigantic hospital establishment.

For the past two weeks, this newborn kid has undergone more medical tests, harder operations, and more blood draws than you can imagine. She sleeps in a crib. She uses a pacifier. She's eating some sort of weird liquid fats through her IV tube instead of breast milk. She lives in a giant NICU unit 45 minutes away from her family's home.

For almost all of that time, I've desperately prayed to God to get Tess out of this nightmare scenario FAST. "Please Lord, get Tess home soon."

Through the miracle of grace, I stopped freaking out about the permanent damage this hospital stay is going to inflict on my little girl's ability to trust and relate to the world. I started to understand that this scary, weird situation is not a result of my or Tessie's sin. Her healing journey was planned by God for his wider purposes-- and her hospital stay going to end when God says it will end.

In the meantime, as my Johnny said "Tess is writing herself one interesting Baby Book."

My youngest girl's Baby Book is not going to match any of her older siblings. Yet it is still a Baby Book. There is still love and joy and funny moments in the desert of the NICU.

God exists in the NICU. Love exists in the NICU. I've had much less bonding time with my newborn than I've wished. However, love is not a strict mathematical formula.

The moments that I've spent rocking my sick baby in her hospital room have the intensity of a desert experience. Being alone, means being close to God. Thanking Him in advance for the gift of healing and the joy of family life that Tessie and I have yet to experience together.

I'm already walking away from the NICU experience 'purified'. Simplified. A better parent and a better Catholic.

St. John of the Cross, pray for us to carry our daily crosses with pure joy.

Today Might Be the Day

That my little baby girl gets to eat again!

Tess had a great night. The doctors will make rounds this morning and may give the final okay to start her on a feeding plan.

Update: Today is not the day. The surgeons want to wait until the big poop comes. Come on Baby Tess--it's been 10 days, 9 hours and 11 minutes since your surgery--not that your Mama is anxiously counting the minutes or anything!

Prayer Request

Tonight is the big night for Baby Tess. If she can get through tonight without any discomfort or vomiting, they might start to feed her tomorrow. Please join me in saying some prayers for her!

Also, could you please pray from Baby Ishmael and his family? This baby is Tessa's roommate and had similar surgery today. Unfortunately, the surgeons found much more extensive damage to his internal organs than they originally suspected. Baby Ishmael's Mom has radiated faith, joy and trust their entire stay. Tonight, she looked so worn down with the weight of the world on her shoulders.

Small Steps Towards Normalcy

Today is the first morning that I haven't spent with Tess since her birth. It feels a little lonely.

Last night she gave clear signs to us and the nurses that she was hungry and wanted to nurse. This morning the doctors are supposed to do her first "feeding assessment." I was so excited to hear that last night. However, this morning we didn't get as great a report from her night nurse. Tess slept fine throughout the night, but her stomach "output" is back to being high and a little bloody. Doesn't look like food or poop is coming today.

This morning I got to home-school my older kids, however. That felt great.

My Older Kids are Home

Three of my four baby birds are back in the nest. As Hannah reported tonight "Everything is A OK, except for Teresa."

Good News

After 8 days of anxious waiting after her surgery, Tess finally showed some solid signs of improvement today. Her stomach "output" is half the volume of the day before. The color is also much closer to "normal" stomach juices. This is a big step forward towards "feeding readiness."

Also, her ulcer looks like its healed.

We are now waiting for the first real "poop" of her life. The nurse told me today "I think I smelled gas today. That's a good sign." Can't believe that I'm so excited to hear that my pretty, blue-eyed girl can toot. But that is life in the NICU!

Thanks for all of your prayers!

Tess is about the same. Mom and Dad are doing much better stress wise, however. My older kids are coming home from grandma and grandpa's house tonight. Yeah!

I'm getting ready to do my commute into the city to visit Tess this morning. I told my husband today that the Children's Hospital Metro Stop is actually the same stop as Catholic University. "When I walked by Catholic U yesterday, I thought 'how much I'd rather be studying this stuff in a safe school room rather than living it!"

My husband laughed! I'm sure God is laughing with me too!

A little encouragement from Carmelite martyr Edith Stein. I love this saint so much. She was a bookworm scholar who was in the middle of writing the MOST beautiful explanation of St. John of the Cross' position on suffering. In the midst of her last revisions to the text, the SS tore her out of her Carmelite convent and sent her to Auschwitz for the crime of being born a Jew. I sort of picture St. John of the Cross saying from heaven "Excellent insights! Now go live it out!"

Here's an description of her last week on earth.

"Arrested on August 2, 1942, by the SS, she died one week later not very far from her home city of Breslau in the Auschwitz extermination camp. In that last week of her life she passed through the infernal network of Hilter's "final solution". She saw two intermediate transit camps in Holland, first Amersfoort, and then Westerbork. Others who had passed through Westerbork have described the deep sense of despair that overcame women in the camp. Understandably, the children were neglected, and an eyewitness account shows that Edith Stein did much to look after them. As Julius Marcan, a survivor, testified "It was Edith Stein's complete calm and self-possession that marked her out from the rest of the prisioners. Many of the mothers were on the brink of insanity and had sat moaning for days, without giving any thought to their children. Edith Stein immediately set about taking care of these little ones. She washed them, combed their hair and tired to make sure they were fed and cared for."

From Westerbork, Edith was able to send back a compelling message to the nuns at her monastery in Echt: "We place our trust in your prayers. There are so many persons here in need of a little comfort, and they expected it from the sisters."

She had only herself to give: her attentiveness, the time she took away from her own worries, and her sense of religious hope. She gave all that she had, because she was fully present with and to others, and she was willing to do as much as she could to share their burden of suffering so as to lighten the load. She acted as a compassionate sister to the suffering, to "be of some help to them."

(Carmel Clarion, March 2010, pg 8).

This last passage really helped me focus on my time with my daughter in the NICU. There is so much that I can't do for her. I can't feed her. I can't sleep next to her. I can't take her home. Yet, love is still a powerful force for good and healing in the NICU. I can give my daughter my "attentiveness, time from my own worries, and my sense of religious hope."

Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, please pray for us.

The Heartbeat of Grace

I spend a lot of my day watching Tessie's heartbeat on her NICU monitor. Up and Down. Peaks and Valleys. Little check marks all lined up in a row.

I've started to think that living in God's grace is a type of intimate heartbeat.

Grace is not a flat plateau. There is no steady rest in the spiritual life. Instead, the movement is constantly up and down.

There are moments when I feel like I'm free falling from my safe, comfortable spot of trusting God. Just like the heart beat rhythm, however, grace is always there to pick me back up again.

Today was another hard day. I walked into the NICU alone (Jon had his first day back at work) at 9 AM after a 2 hour commute on the subway. I found my little girl all alert with her pretty blue eyes open and a special smile just for her Mama. However, her stomach "output" was a sickening dark, bloody red.

Lots of red output is not good. It's a sign that her intestine is still tightly closed. Before the doctors will begin feeding Tess real food, they want her stomach juices to be clear and a mere 2 mL each hour.

Tess is so, so far from healing from her surgery last Tuesday. She is so, so far from going home.

After a long day of tests and IV pokes, I started crying hard at 7 PM. Jon had stopped by after work and was reading Tess his favorite children's book, Winnie the Pooh. I started crying because I can't believe that we are still stuck in the awful "not knowing" six days after surgery, ten days after my first ER visit and fourteen days after her birth.

I prayed. Nothing seemed to help. I couldn't believe that I still couldn't take my beloved baby girl home with me. I had no idea how I'd tear myself out of her NICU room this night.

After several minutes, Tessa's old nurse from last night stuck her head into our room just to say hello. She asked us how we were doing. I said "not to good." I held up the bloody "output" trap to highlight my point. "Oh no, no," the nurse said. "That is a much better color than last night and there is a smaller amount as well."

"Are you sure?" I said.

"Yes, yes. I was very concerned last night. That is why I called the surgeon. He said we need to give more time for the ulcer medicine to work. See it is already working. Soon it will do it's job."

I didn't feel immediately better, but the heartbeat of grace caught up with me. After the kind nurse left, Jon turned out the lights and sang lullabyes to our baby. I wrote a quick email to a friend in the dark. Afterwards, we walked out of the NICU holding hands.

Sometimes, I can walk away from Tessa's crib and just pretend that my baby is happily asleep in her nursery, a mere 45 minutes from my bedroom door.

Grace. Faith. Prayer. Trust.

St. Teresa of Avila, please watch over Tess tonight.

Missionaries from Africa

During Tessa's sickness, my husband and I have run into three Nigerian priests who are all Dominicans, all missionaries, and all Catholic Chaplains at local hospitals in D.C. Our Archbishop certainly was guided by the Holy Spirit when he made these assignments.

Each of our "African Fathers" had a unique combination of total love, gentleness, ease in the face of suffering and theological strictness. They were each true Fathers.

The priests greeted us with kindness and love. They prayed deep heartfelt prayers over our daughter. And then they took Jon and I too task. They encouraged us to use this tough situation to become better Christians.

We ran into our first African priest seconds after our kid got admitted into the NICU. My husband grabbed my hand and pulled me into Sunday Mass at the hospital. I don't think I've ever been more unwilling to listen to Jesus. I'd already received communion a few hours earlier. My kid just got admitted into the NICU. I decided that I'd more than fulfilled my Sunday obligation. It was time for me to rush home, brush my teeth for the first time in 48 hours and rush back to restart my vigil over my sick newborn.

So when Father A started his homily last Sunday with the question: "Why are you here?" I answered "because my husband made me come!"

In his excited African accent, Father A kept hollering "Why are you here? Why didn't you just stay in bed this morning? What did you expect when you decided to follow Jesus? Tea and cookies!"

He yelled this last line "Tea and Cookies" until it shook the chapel.

(And the answer, of course, is that in order to follow Jesus we have to carry a cross.) But the saying "What did you expect, Tea and Cookies?" has become a humorous mantra thought this first, hard week.

Two hours after Father A's great homily, the Father, a nun, Jon and I were all waiting outside the NICU to preform an emergency baptism on my little girl before she was rushed to Children's Hospital for surgery. Sister Kathy really racked Father A over the coals for having an overly excited homily. "You went over the line, Father," she said. "There were people like the Benjamins in that congregation who have real problems, the parents of very sick children."

Father A started to blush. Jon and I both protested. His homily was great. It was just what I needed to hear. And in that moment, in the hallway, I did feel blessed.

Father A and the two Fathers who ministered to us this week at Children's Hospital, did me a great service. They were kind. They were compassionate. But they also pushed me hard spiritually.

Carry your cross. Pray for others. Give thanks for a Faith that sustains you. "I know you are praying hard, but you need to pray harder.""Forget all those who are being unkind to you. Your energy is so precious right now, you don't have space to deal with that stuff right now. Instead, cherish the people who are helping take care of your children, your spouse and yourself."

The African missionaries are great in a hospital, because they are not scandalized by children suffering. Children in their countries see greater misery all the time. Instead, they remind us to be thankful to the medical profession. They remind us that "tears come at the night, but joy comes in the morning."

Lord God, thank you for the gift of the priesthood.

Backsliding

We found out that Tess is doing a little backsliding. Because she hasn't eaten in over a week, acid is eating away at her stomach lining. My little girl needed her first blood transfusion today. That transfusion was four hour process, which meant that we couldn't hold her all day.

Of course, the new "stomach problem" means that we're even further from starting to feed her and then take her home.

I joked with Jon that next time I'll think twice about naming a daughter after a saint who PRAYED to have the grace of sickness and then was happily paralyzed for over three years.

St. Teresa of Avila, we pray for Baby Teresa's speedy healing. Please send her home in less than three weeks.

Baby Steps Towards Home

Tess moved into a "regular" crib instead of a heated "baby table" yesterday. She figured out how to hold a pacifier in her mouth by herself. We're weaning her off oxygen. She's got this scary tube in her head that's just a "back up" IV port. It's frustrating to her vain Mama who wants to put cute hats on her head- but that IV will probaby stay in her head until we go home because Tess is labeled a "hard stick", i.e. a baby who DOESN'T LIKE IV pokes. The yellow tube (by Jon's hand) is what we desperately want to go away soon. It's called an NG tube. Currently its sucking up all the yucky stuff from her stomach that isn't going down her intestine like it should. As soon as the color turns a nice, normal light yellow, we can start feeding her breast milk. And as soon as she can hold down breast milk -- We can go HOME!

How to stay sane in the NICU

I hit bottom yesterday physically, spiritually and emotionally. So Jesus sent us a Dominican priest for Confession, the Eucharist and some much needed spiritual direction. Jesus loves us all so much!

View from our hospital room window