Chapter 1

2. Hospital

The doctor (the same dude that actually pushed Little Lion out into the world), believed that our baby was having trouble breathing due to low blood sugars.
He immediately administered a sugar solution and wrapped him up extra warm and snuggly.
Soon after, we were transferred to the newborn intensive care unit (NICU).

Little Lion got the last available bed in the ALMC NICU.
Mr Mechanic told me after the fact that the NICU was full and they couldn’t accept our baby.
He stayed there at the desk, shook his head and said, “No.” And just didn’t budge until they relented.
Wonderfully, they moved things around and Little Lion got an emergency back-up bed, the last, LAST option available.

At the NICU they connected him to oxygen to monitor his breathing.
Shortly after, when I tried to give him another bottle, he began gasping for breath.

I watched on the oxygen monitor as his levels rapidly dropped to 45% and he changed color, though not as drastically as a few hours before.
Nurses came running and quickly connected Little Lion to a CPAP machine, and his oxygen rose to normal.
The doctor called it ‘oxygen desaturation’, as if somehow that’s less scary for a parent to hear.
Let’s all be saturated with oxygen, shall we? Especially the babies.

We remained at the NICU for two weeks.

It was a trying time; I was sleeping at the hospital while Mr Mechanic was taking care of me, being there to help with Little Lion, and caring for our family at home – incredible man!
I didn’t get any sleep (even less than normal with a newborn), and was eating the same hospital meal (chicken and rice) for lunch and dinner for the entire two weeks. I looked forward to the fruit salad Mr Mechanic smuggled in for me every afternoon.
It was two weeks of extreme exhaustion and constant worry.

After the first four days, Little Lion was taken off the CPAP machine and also began to have the oxygen removed. He continued to be monitored, but was breathing independently. However, he wasn’t eating/drinking enough and he wasn’t gaining steady weight.
A nasal gastro tube (NGTube) was through his nose to his stomach to push food directly into him.
Oh, I hated that awful thing in his nose.
He did, too. He grabbed it, ripped of the medical tape and detached the tube at least three times.
Pretty strong for a newborn. Especially a newborn that apparently isn’t drinking enough.

• 

The ALMC NICU and its staff are incredible.
It saves the lives of infants with medical issues, especially premature babies in and around the Arusha area.
There is even a backpack-toting, hiking-shoes-wearing NICU doctor who meets new moms wherever they are (sometimes that means the bush) and escorts them back to the hospital.
Please check out these links to learn more about this extraordinary facility.
You can also donate to their program and help save the lives of infants in Arusha, or assist a mother with a baby in the NICU.

• Facebook Page
• ALMC hospital website
• Instagram Page

After a few days, Mr Mechanic took over a feeding and I would (try) sleep for a solid 3 or 4 hours.
It was the beginning of hot season and there was no air conditioning. Also, a nearby church had started BLASTING Christmas carols (yes, in November!!! I know, ridiculous on so many levels…), so there was also that.
After the first week, Mr Mechanic arranged for someone to drive me home so I could see our other kids, have a decent shower and change my clothes. He stayed at the hospital with Little Lion for a few hours, and I would feel slightly brighter when I returned in the late evening.

It was hard, but together we managed.

Those two weeks were excruciating.
And, we didn’t get any answers.
The doctors didn’t know why Little Lion ‘desaturated’, and they couldn’t give us a clear answer for why he wasn’t gaining weight, and couldn’t remain awake for a full feeding.
But, he never turned blue again. He was successfully breathing on his own.

At the end of two weeks he progressed enough that we could go home, and follow up with a pediatrician.

We assumed it was something related to being a newborn and were just happy Little Lion was home and improving.

3. Yellow

Then, at 6 weeks, Little Lion appeared jaundiced. A yellow-ish tinge to his skin.
The doctor was a bit surprised, but encouraged us to get him into the morning and evening sun.

After a week, no improvement.
So, we had to run blood tests to see what was wrong.

It was horrible trying to get blood from him. They tried for two hours, poking and prodding him. They even tried in his scalp and shaved a bit of his hair to jab a needle in there (no luck, but a funny hair cut).
In the end, they only got enough to check for some infections, not enough to run all the tests they wanted.
Little Lion did not have an infection.

A few days later, we went for the needle-prodding and stabbing again, to run more tests.

Newborn jaundice is expected, unsurprising. Jaundice at 6,7,8 weeks? this is abnormal. It can be a sign of an issue involving the liver, bile ducts or gallbladder.
In Little Lion’s case, the test results showed severely elevated levels of bilirubin. Shockingly high, the doctor stated.

It indicated a major liver problem.

Something that this hospital, the best in Arusha, was not equipped to address further.
Possibly needing surgery.
Possibly needing invasive, specialized treatment.
Definitely needing more advanced equipment and testing than was available in Arusha.
And definitely needing answers as soon as possible.

The next day, we were sitting in the doctor’s office, and he was writing us a letter so we could travel internationally for medical treatment.

Chapter 3

Perhaps you have read the beautifully illustrated children’s book “On the Night You Were Born” by Nancy Tillman. Buy it here.
It goes like this:

On the night you were born, the moon smiled with such wonder that the stars peeked in to see you and the night wind whispered. “Life will never be the same.”

I’m completely with this fun blogger, The Ugly Volvo (theuglyvolvo.com), who wrote a personalized version for her son. Much more realistic.

For us it was more like:

On the night you were born, Daddy woke up confused and Mommy screamed for the promised nitrous oxide that the hospital didn’t have in stock.

But, it is true that life has never been the same.

1. Arrival

Without sharing all the details (because Lord knows you don’t want to read everything!), here are some fun tidbits:

• Mr Mechanic was out until after midnight dealing with a separate family emergency. He barely got any sleep before I woke him up to head to the hospital.
• The nurse argued with the doctor about how dilated I was, because she didn’t believe I could dilate from 4 cm to 7 cm in 40 minutes.
• I fainted after. Apparently your blood pressure does freaky things during/after childbirth.
• I was promised nitrous oxide/laughing gas as the pain management technique, but they didn’t actually have it at the hospital (Seriously?!? Seriously?!?).
  So I asked for something else, and they said no, nothing else.
  I sat up in bed and announced to Mr Mechanic we were going to another hospital (at 4 o’clock in the morning). Miraculously they DID have an injection of something for me. Liars.
• 1 hr 30 minutes later it was time to push, but I couldn’t: I was all out of breath and energy. So the awesome doctor gave me the fastest episiotomy ever, jumped up on the bed, straddled me and heaved on my belly to manually push out the baby.
  I didn’t even know that was possible, did you?
  Had a belt of purple bruises across my abdomen for a week, but baby avoided any problems with delayed labor and I avoided more serious surgery.

• 

Little Lion arrived and was placed on my chest, a reddish squiggle.
Except – he didn’t cry. I remember praying aloud for the baby to breathe. Breathe! BREATHE!
Until the doctor calmly reassured me he was breathing – just not crying.

I fainted, and somehow woke up in another room beside this squishy newborn totally dependent on me and Mr Mechanic.
Everyone said the baby was a perfect specimen, and we could go home the next day, as long as I didn’t faint anymore.

But Little Lion wouldn’t – or couldn’t – nurse. So, we prepared a bottle of formula and sent for a nurse.
She held Little Lion lovingly and started to give him the bottle.
Then her expression changed, she abruptly stood up, announced in Swahili he wasn’t breathing properly, and charged out of the room with Little Lion in her extended arms.
Her shouted prayers for “Jesus! Help!” echoed behind as she ran down the stairs.
Mr Mechanic and I followed in a panic, catching her prayers through the maze of the empty clinic, and arrived at an emergency room with oxygen tanks.

By now, the nurse was screaming instructions at full volume: “Call the doctor!” “Get the oxygen tank working!” “Jesus – Help us!” “Bring this item!” “Jesus Christ!”
While Mr Mechanic and I stood aside completely helpless, absolutely terrified.

The oxygen tank wasn’t working.
The nurse dropped the items around and under the examination bed and laid Little Lion on the too-long padded table and manually started delivering oxygen by “bagging”: squeezing a device over his nose and mouth in an effort to pump the oxygen into him.

By this time, despite the poor lighting of a single bare bulb on the ceiling, I could see that Little Lion was turning blue.
And the nurse wasn’t stopping. Between shouts of “Jesus! Help!” she kept right on squeezing oxygen. “Jesus! Save us!” Squeeze. “Savior! Come!”
A minute passed.

The doctor swooped in, and I noticed Mr Mechanic was not beside me. He wasn’t even in the room.
“Jesus!” The nurse was bagging and updating the doctor. “The blood of Jesus over this child!” And I needed to sit down or I was going to faint. “Jesus! Save us!”

Mr Mechanic was just outside the door, on his knees, fervently praying. I knelt down beside him and I sort of prayed. It was a jumble of babbling and gasping for breath, my whole being willing for God to make my baby breathe, and intermittently not fully articulating any word or thought just sending up some desperate emotions.
And sometimes, I copied the nurse and called: “Jesus! Help us!”

And we listened for anything, anything at all.
Two minutes passed.
The nurse’s shouted prayers paused.
A terrible stillness escaped the emergency room and entered the hallway beside us.
Mr Mechanic and I opened our eyes and felt the cold hovering around us.

And Little Lion cried.
It is the only time I have delighted to hear him cry.
Because I knew it meant he was breathing.

Chapter 2