Inside Our NICU Story: The Part of Birth No One Prepares You For

There’s a before and after when it comes to the NICU.

Before, you still believe birth will follow some version of the story you imagined.

After, everything is different — the pace, the fears, the way your body reacts to the smallest sounds. Even years later, the beeping of a monitor in a doctor’s office can hit a nerve you didn’t know was still raw.

Nothing prepares you for the NICU.

Not books, not classes, not the stories other parents share. It’s its own world — one you’re thrown into without warning, without orientation, and without time to steady yourself.

The first hours were a blur I can barely piece together

Meadow came six weeks early.

Everything happened fast — too fast for my mind to catch up. I didn’t get the slow, sacred first moments people talk about. I didn’t get to memorize her face or breathe her in before she was moved. I just watched as she was taken to a place I had no control over.

I remember feeling numb. Detached.

Everyone kept telling me she was okay, but “okay” in the NICU is a completely different language.

It means machines.

It means wires.

It means nurses moving confidently while your heart shakes in your chest.

It means stepping into a room where your tiny baby looks even smaller under fluorescent lights.

The NICU hums with constant alarms — and every one of them hits your body like a shock

If you’ve been in the NICU, you know the soundtrack:

• the soft hiss of oxygen

• the constant beeping

• the alarms that spike your heart rate instantly

• nurses moving in and out with practiced efficiency

At first, every alarm felt like a crisis. My body reacted before my brain could process anything. My shoulders stayed tight. My breathing stayed shallow. I tried to look calm, but inside I was spiraling quietly every time something beeped.

You learn over time that not every alarm means danger.But your nervous system doesn’t get that memo. Mine didn’t.

Trying to bond while surviving

Everyone tells you to bond with your baby.

Skin-to-skin. Eye contact. Warm moments.

But the NICU makes bonding complicated.

I was scared.

Exhausted

Sick

In shock

I loved her — but love doesn’t always look like instant connection.

Sometimes love looks like showing up every day, even when your heart feels empty.

My bonding with Meadow didn’t happen in those early NICU days. I carried guilt about that for a long time. It felt like a failure no one talks about.

But I still came. Every day.And that was its own kind of love.

Learning a new language because you have no choice

I learned terms I never expected to know:

• oxygen saturation

• aspiration

• bilirubin

• apnea

• NG feeds

  
  

I learned how to read her monitors.

I learned her patterns.

I learned how to stay calm even when everything in me wanted to scream.

NICU parents become experts — not because they want to, but because their child needs them to.

There are tiny moments that saved me

Not big, dramatic ones.

Just tiny things that made the days feel survivable:

The way her fingers curled around mine.

The quiet reassurance from a nurse who understood what I couldn’t say out loud.

A good feeding.

A stable night.

Leaving the hospital with even a small piece of hope.

Those little flashes of light are what kept me going.

Leaving the NICU doesn’t mean the NICU leaves you

The day we went home wasn’t the end.

It was the beginning of new fears, new routines, and a lingering trauma I didn’t have the words for.

You don’t just “move on.”You carry it.

The alarms. The worry. The constant scanning for danger.

It stays in your body long after the monitors are gone.

And for us, the NICU was only the first chapter of a much longer medical journey — one that eventually led to the feeding tube, the therapies, the ups and downs we lived through for over three years.

But the NICU changed me in ways I didn’t understand until much later.

The NICU shaped the doula I became

I learned how fear settles into a parent’s body.

I learned how medical environments can drain you even when things look “fine.”

I learned what it feels like to be overwhelmed, exhausted, and scared — all while trying to keep it together for your baby.

That experience is why I show up the way I do now:

• slow

• steady

• patient

• gentle

• informed

• aware of the things people don’t say out loud

I support my clients with that NICU awareness — that deep understanding that birth and postpartum can be joyful and traumatic at the same time.

The NICU didn’t break me.

It reshaped me.

It grew the part of me that knows how to hold others through uncertainty, fear, and complexity.

And that’s the part of me I bring into every birth space.