Sylvia's Journal

Today will be the completion of Saffi’s first week in the world. We are all glad it is over as it was a rather trying week. Sita and baby were discharged on Wednesday night. Our plan had worked: the baby had gained a few grams and the hospital staff relented, sending Sita home with some fifty tiny bottles of formula. Later we realized they were about to expire, another item to get out of the hospital as they would otherwise have to be discarded.

Being at home made all the difference. The stress melted like snow in the sun. Sita and Jim were finally able to settle into their new rhythm without uniformed staff interrupting them constantly. The baby met her regular pediatrician who noticed more weight gain and so we are on the path to normalcy. Sita hopes to be done with the formula and pumping after more weight gain is recorded at the next weigh-in on Monday.

Faro is beginning to act out a bit, being a little rambunctious and testy. We try to be gentle with him and Sita gives him special attention when the baby is asleep. The baby’s presence in his life is no longer an abstraction. With Saffi living in his house, and worse,  in his mammy’s and papa’s bedroom, we try to be understanding of the turmoil in his little head.

He was distracted from all the changes by a visit from his cousin who is 6 months older. They had a good time running around the yard and playing on the gym set. Faro was like a little puppy, getting wet in the small pool and then rolling around in the dirt, stuffing mouthfuls of dirt in his face and then looking up to see our reaction.

We had celebrated Axel’s 69 nine birthday the day before. We gave him an etching that he had drooled over some 6 months ago in Manchester’s second hand store, The Stock Exchange. He had researched the etching and had debated buying it. Then one day it was gone and he regretted not making a decision earlier. What he didn’t know is that Sita and I had bought it. He was very surprised to see it again. I also gave him Ottlenghi’s vegetarian cookbook (Plenty). He went straight to work and by Friday night we had already tried three of the recipes, all of them enormous improvements on the hospital food Sita and Jim had lived on for nearly a week.

It was nice to be on vacation, even though it included vacuuming and running errands. I did finish at least one of my trip reports, my expense reports, responded to a few emails and dealt with an email hacking scare, but all is settled down now. This is a good thing as the next trip is already staring me in the face: Thursday I am off to Manila.

Axel and I quickly settled into our new grandparents’ routine. I continued to live out of my suitcase, wearing the same clothes as I did in Madagascar and Lomé. They were too cold for Madagascar, and just right for the temperatures in Lomé and too much for the heatwave in Easthampton.

While Jim slept at the hospital we got Faro up in the morning, brought him to school and then continued to the hospital. Sita was recovering very slowly from the ordeal and in considerable pain. The hospital procedures and rules did not help.

One night I traded places with Jim and spent the night with Sita. It was a sleepless night for both of us. It was an eyeopener for me as I compared this experience with having Tessa at the Beverly hospital birth center 30 years ago.

Although the nurses were nice, except for one we quickly referred to as nurse Ratchet, the stream of specialists interrupting all hours of the day and night is maddening – nurses for this, nurses for that, doctors for this, doctors for that, each demanding adherence to rules that didn’t always make sense. I was familiar with the hospital routine that insist that each caregiver first asks name and date of birth before providing care. You’d think that after this was established at first with the assigned medical staff, or if they’d just seen Sita 10 minutes ago, this could be bypassed.  But rules are rules of course and I am sure that the lawyers had a serious talk with the staff. The hospital had gotten some law suits on its hands a few years ago and the ownership changed. I could see the lawyers’ finger prints on everything. Good care is trumped by rule-following.

Even the person bringing the food tray checked name and date of birth; that was new to me. But again, I could see the lawyer waving his or her finger: deliver the food tray to the wrong person and we have a lawsuit on our hands. Can’t they not simply check the name of the room against the person? How many checks are needed? It is beginning to look like the TSA with five different people checking on what the previous person has already done.

When specialist advice went against Sita and my intuition about how to get food into Saffi we consulted the patient rights charter on the hospital’s website. It was written in language that, although meant to be supportive of patients, was more supportive to the hospital’s owners than to us ordinary people. We figured that if Sita used her right to refuse treatment, she’d have to sign all sorts of harsh sounding and unintelligible papers to release the hospital of any and all responsibilities, even those we thought were justified, like not putting Sita’s baby to her breast for long stretches of time the day of Saffi’s birth and the day after.  When Sita questioned the doctor and nurses about that some days later they responded with ‘that was then and now we are here!” Someone was protecting someone from something.

One night when I relieved Sita for a bit taking Saffi into the visitor’s room, so that the exhausted mom could sleep, I found the room both frigid and noisy. A giant industrial blower was turned on, apparently to dry the carpet under a drink dispensing machine. I asked whether they could please turn it off. No one was authorized to do so.

By day 5 we were told that the baby was still losing weight and she had apparently crossed a line that got alarm bells going. Having seen Faro losing much more than that three years ago and seeing him now, Sita and I were not concerned. But the doctor and nurse Ratchet were;  another rule got activated and formula was added to her regime. Sita and I resisted until we were told that under these circumstances Sita could be discharged but not the baby.  Since our objective was to get out of the place as fast as we could, we relented and embarked on a weight gain campaign and never mind the method.  Saffi obliged, gained a bit of weight and Sita and baby were discharged in the evening. Everyone is home now and we can make our own rules.

The nice people of Delta upgraded me to business class for the long flight to Boston. Usually I don’t consider this a long flight but when you are rushing home seven plus hours is very long. The upgrade made the wait easier and allowed for a glass of champagne to toast myself to my new granddaughter.

Axel picked me up for the ride to the Northampton hospital in Western Massachusetts, where Sita and Saffi were recovering from the ordeal of childbirth. That too was a long ride, especially the bottleneck on the Mass Turnpike where holidaymakers were jamming up the road to points south such as New York and New Jersey, returning from their New Hampshire and Maine vacations.

I found Sita and Saffi, both exhausted but looking good in the maternity ward, surrounded by family and friends. I finally got to hold little Saffi, her eyes firmly closed and probably hoping she was still in the womb and all these noises and lights would go away. During the night she perks up, when everyone is gone and the lights are dim.

Unlike Faro who was rushed off to specialist care in the nursery, and emerged with tubes coming out and going in several body parts, Saffi was unblemished, although she did have a low-jack box around her ankle to prevent her from being snitched away by a stranger, and bands around both ankles to tell who she was.

We stayed for the week to help Jim with the logistics of another child and a diabetic cat. We held the fort at home while Jim kept his two girls company in the hospital.

Faro took everything in stride although he was barely interested in his new sister, holding her only one for the obligatory ‘new sibling’ picture, including the kiss. But that was enough. He did inquiry whether she was talking and pooping, two important activities in the life of a 3 year old.

Just as I was boarding the AF flight out of Lome word came through that our second grandchild had arrived at about 3 PM in the afternoon on Saturday July 25, weighing in at some 8 pounds. I believe her name is Saffi but I can’t get anyone to answer the phone in the middle of the night in Easthampton. I spent the day anxiously waiting for news after hearing in the middle of Friday night that Sita had been admitted to the hospital and that a Cesarean was likely to happen yesterday. I kept beating myself up for not having taken the Friday night flight to Paris, but who could have known? The girl wasn’t scheduled to arrive until August 1.