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I wake up to a quiet house on the 25th December 2005. It is Christmas Day. The Chrtistmas tree is not set up. I am a practicing Buddhist and my husband Olaf, a Catholic. We have always celebrated Chrtistmas by cooking the traditional British Christmas meal of roast turkey with all the trimmings with family and friends. I have given birth to two babies - twin boys at 32 weeks gestation 9 days ago. The Nursery is not set up. The buggy (stroller) is still packaged and unopened. Car seats are bought and left in the hallway. I call the NICU to find out how the babies got through the night. I am told Joshua is fine, but Ryan have not had fed well through the night. We get ready and drive to the NICU where we spend the day.

This is NOT what I had in my mind for Christmas. Our twin boys were not due to be born until February 2006!!!!

Ryan and Joshua are formula fed through the bottle every 3 hours. There are 12 babies in the room. We walk into Room 3 and cannot see either of the babies. We panic. What has happened? The staff tells us they have now graduated to Room 2 which is classified as less critical than Room 3. Our target was to get the babies into Room 1 from where patients are released out of NICU.:D

I watch the nurses and learn pretty fast on how to manage two babies - albeit hooked to machines which monitors their breathing and various other stats as they are still incubated. This means the medics do not think they can control their body temperature themselves which full term babies can. I do what the nurses do, however, I  cuddle  and rock the baby I fed until I am due to feed the next one. I think they now know their Mommy.;) Time goes fast when you feed two babies as it takes forever for Ryan to feed and Joshua has a habit of drinking too fast and throwing it all up on some feeds.:roll:

There is one Nurse for 6 babies in a 12 hour shift. They feed according to a schedule, change nappies (diapers), make a note of what was in the nappy, how much the baby drank, put them down and move on to the next baby. They do not have the time to pick up and cuddle. Sometimes, I am the only parent in the room. They have the blinds opne from 7 am in the morning to 7 pm in thenight and then the blinds are brought down and lights are dimmed. I am told this to teach the babies the difference between night and day.

Incubator: In biotechnology. an apparatus in which environmental conditions can be set and controlled.

Incubators are used in microbiology for culturing (growing) bacteria and other microorganisms. Incubators in tissue culture rooms are used for culturing stem cells, lymphocytes, skin fibroblasts and other types of cells. And in the hospital nursery and newborn intensive care unit (NICU), incubators serve to house and maintain premature and ill infants.

Incubators were developed for infants in France as early as 1857. The first one in the US was built by Dr. William Champion Deming at the State Emigrant Hospital, Ward's Island, New York. The "hatching cradle" was first occupied on September 7, 1888 by Edith Eleanor McLean, birth weight 2 pounds, 7 ounces. The device was warmed by 15 gallons of water.

(http://www.medterms.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=18426)

Picture of Olaf with one of our sons on Christmas Day, 2005. The picture is dark as it must have been in the night.

The staff have very kindly given 2 presents to Ryan and Joshua which we are very surprised to see inside their incubators. I think wow. Someone is acknowleging they are 2 human beings. It was two very small soft animals which we place inside the incubators.

I am happy to be doing all that we can do as parents to two babies in intensive care. I feel useful. The babies are putting on weight. We need to wait until the medics tell us the boys are ready to move into open cots and show they can maintain their body temperatures.

There are all kinds of Nurses working at the NICU in 12 hour shifts. Sometimes they are under staffed. Some are from far away foreign lands who has been contracted out by Nursing Agencies. Some we meet once and never again. Our babies are being cared for by people we do not know, but have to trust as we have no choice. Olaf and myself lost control of our babies the day they were born. Olaf gets upset by the lack of empathy and professionalism by some of the Nurses. He bites his tongue as I do as we leave late at night every evening and go back to an empty home ..........

There was one time I could not keep quiet, I recall one incident. I bring in one morning 2 bottles of breast milk which I have painstakingly expressed through the night before stored in the two bottles which came with the pumping kit given to me by my sister. After taking the milk out, the nurse in charge that morning decides to dump the bottles in the bin. When I ask her for the bottles back, she tells me she threw them away for reasons I cannot recall. I explain to her those were not disposable plastic bottles, but part of the Ameda breast pump kit given to me by my sister who was expecting it back for her next baby. She got me to feel so useless and powerless.....She never apologised. I found the bottles in the bin and complained to the Consultants and explained how insensitive this Nurse is. After that, she was never in charge of either one of my sons ever again. There was a lot of other 'minor' issues in regard to Nurses, but this is the only incident I remember today to write about.

The boys are due to have brain scans next to determine the effects of the brain bleeds they had on their development.....what will they show? Brain damage? Deformities? Find out next!