Viral Diaries (8)

April 20, 2020

South Carolina

In the midst of the coronavirus tension, baby girl decided to come early. After a grueling 40 hour labor followed by an emergency c-section, our daughter made a dramatic entrance into the world. The story itself deserves to be written as a piece of its own, but even though the haze of the painkillers has finally worn off, I’m struggling to find a place to start. I’m not even sure I’ve fully processed everything that has happened.

For the past ten days, I’ve placed any news about the coronavirus on the backburner. It’s become a situation of which I am passively aware. Throughout my hospital stay, I didn’t see the lower half of any of the staff’s faces, and tried to remember things like piercings, tattoos, and mannerisms to correctly identify who I was speaking with. I tried to check name tags as frequently as possible, but the oxycodone I’d been prescribed provided constant challenge to my memory. I was hesitant to accept the mask wearing/frequent sanitization/locked down state of things as the new normal but spending so much time in the hospital has forced me to deal with the way life is and likely will be for the foreseeable future.

I’ve made trips to the NICU almost every day since she’s been born. The already strict visitation regulations for the ward have been tightened even further. Hayden and I are the only ones can visit at all, but only one of us is allowed in per day. I’ve felt her skin without gloves only a few times, and sometimes when the nurses walk out of the room, I briefly pull down my mask so I can smell her hair. The way she reacts to her pacifier makes me feel as if she is ready to feed, and it saddens me that for now, the only way she can recieve my breastmilk is through cotton swabs and syringes. The staff set up a camera so we can watch her while we’re at home, but it pales in comparison to the hour or two a day that I am able to hold her in my arms.

The number of cases in the state have passed 4,200, with 100 deaths total. Thankfully, it has been reported that approximately 67% of those cases have thus far ended in recovery. The governor is planning to reopen the beaches and retail businesses by next week (with some minor limitations), a move that makes me incredibly nervous. My mother is returning from her work contract in Iowa next week, and I worry about her traveling through so many states.

There is not much I can do other than to try and take precautions. That, and wait for things to blow over, both with my daughter and with the virus.