When Kelli Kelley awoke from her C-section 17 years ago, having delivered her son after just 24 weeks of pregnancy, her husband gave her a Polaroid of their baby. He was tiny, underdeveloped, eyes still fused shut, with translucent skin covered in fine hair, and lying in a sea of medical equipment and lines. To Kelley, he looked like a baby bird. Cut to her first visit to the neonatal intensive-care unit (nicu) to meet him: a cacophony of beeping machines, harsh lighting, “space-age-looking equipment,” and hospital smells, with 40 “tiny, alien babies in boxes.” Her son had a whole team of doctors and nurses working to keep him alive, but Kelley felt frightened and alone. Kelley remembers just one support group for parents, with a chaplain. “Sitting with a man in a collar felt more like a memorial service,” she recalls.
Four months later Kelley and her husband brought their son home. He was on a heart monitor and still unable to breastfeed. They lived under a crush of medical bills, and in his first year, their baby underwent three surgeries. Kelley didn’t recognize the toll her son’s ordeal had taken on her until two years later when their daughter was born at 34 weeks with a blood disorder. The family returned to the nicu, and for Kelley, the trauma from both births collided. Kelley was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder; but her son was already five before Kelley finally received a post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis.
“The experience of the neonatal intensive-care unit, the birth of a premature baby—it’s a very different kind of trauma from what we call single-incident trauma, like someone in a car accident or even a sexual assault,” explains Richard J. Shaw, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at Stanford University’s Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. In the nicu, traumatic, stressful events are continuous: your baby’s fragile health, other babies coding, a flow of bad news about your baby’s current health and future prognosis. Mothers—themselves still recovering from childbirth—commonly describe guilt, feeling as though they’d somehow failed their children by giving birth early (even though, of course, they couldn’t help it), and a sense of uselessness in the shadow of a medical team of experts. Only in recent years have researchers begun recognizing that the fear, stress, and anxiety parents carry with them out of the nicu can manifest later as PTSD.
[For more on this story by SARAH STANKORB, go to https://www.theatlantic.com/he...hand-to-hold/555821/]
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