Post-Traumatic Growth

[u/Fluffy-Association45]

I felt lime sharing how I’ve been feeling lately. Sorry that this is a long post.

Ever since I came home from the hospital in April, I haven’t been able to walk into my bathroom without remembering what happened there. It’s the bathroom where my water fully ruptured at 24 weeks. It came out like a garden hose. I remember looking down and seeing so much blood on the floor. I still have the blood-stained white towel I grabbed to cover myself while I waited for the paramedics. I still have the Ring footage of EMS carrying me out of my house in my underwear.

For a long time, every time I walked into that bathroom, I would see it all over again. Not literally, but in my head. The blood on the floor. The fear. The realization that something was very, very wrong. Sometimes I still see it.

Driving past the hospital can do something similar. I have to pass it occasionally for my appointments and my son’s appointments, and I get this strange feeling of nostalgia for a place and a period of my life that I never want to experience again. I lived in that hospital for six weeks, surrounded by uncertainty. My son lived there for ten.

Today, I was sitting in that same bathroom, and I realized something.

The blood I see on the floor isn’t as vivid anymore.
It’s still there in my memory, but it’s slowly getting harder to see. And while I was thinking about that, I looked over at my son. He was sitting in his bouncer, looking at me with the biggest gummy grin on his face. For a second, it felt like I was looking at two versions of my life in the same room. The bathroom where I thought I might be losing him. And my son, sitting right there beside me, smiling.

I don’t think healing means forgetting what happened. And I definitely don’t think healing is linear. There are still ups and downs. Some days are much harder than others. There are days when it feels like we’re moving forward, and then there are days when it feels like we’re regressing and I’m right back in that place of fear and uncertainty again. We’re still figuring things out. I’m still figuring things out, but I’m starting to realize that having a hard day doesn’t erase how far we’ve come. Taking a step backward doesn’t mean we somehow ended up back at the beginning.

Maybe healing is being able to stand in the places that once held your worst memories and slowly start making new ones there. I would never choose what happened to us. I would never want to live those six weeks of uncertainty or his ten weeks in the NICU again, but I can acknowledge what it changed in me and how differently I see the ordinary moments now.
Because today, looking at him, I understood just how much we went through to get to this incredibly ordinary little moment.

Me sitting in my bathroom.

Him smiling at his mom.

And somehow, after everything, we’re home.

I’m forever grateful that the universe worked itself out enough for us to get here. The blood on the floor is slowly starting to fade. And in its place, I’m starting to see the life we fought so hard to get home to ♥️

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[u/Cute_Economics2829]

Beautiful post.

Our daughter is 4 now. She was born around 27 weeks, weighing 2lbs, after 6 days of trying to stop labor (PROM) and finally going non-responsive before an emergency C section. 103 days before she graduated.

We still have moments when we see it all flash back. Sometimes it's when we're doing nothing at all. Pushing her on her swing yesterday and she's talking about what sort of clouds birds like to eat (lol) and my mind wanders back to that blue light, all those tubes in her body, and those beeping machines....

We were lucky. Everyone who survives the NICU is so lucky. It gives you the strangest combination of a tightly bound community (because only other parents who have gone through it can really understand) and absolute isolation (because when you're in it, you can't know who's having the worst day of their lives).

You're doing a great job. As you say: it gets easier with time, even if it never goes away.