Fragile

She looked around the room, rotating three hundred and sixty degrees at snail’s pace, taking in every minute detail. The pale yellow walls, the pure white ceiling. The wallpaper with teddy bears and balloons running around all four walls: not at all unusual decorations for a nursery. Everything was pristine: the crisp paint work, the white cot, the change table packed with nappies, and the tallboy; tiny jumpsuits and miniature socks lovingly folded in the drawers. It looked perfect, and the woman’s whirling emotions were the only disturbance in the room.

Her gaze fell upon the rocking chair in the corner, the patchwork quilt her mother had made for her resting on the seat. Sinking into the chair, her lip began to tremble, and as she rocked, a tear slipped from the corner of her eye and made its way down her cheek, followed by another.

This room had looked the same for five years. The young woman and her husband had decorated it in anticipation of their first child when they realised she was pregnant five years earlier. They had been full of excitement. Slightly apprehensive and nervous, but ecstatic nonetheless, after two years of happy marriage they were about to embark on the next journey in their life: starting a family.

She had awoken in the middle of the night two months later to severe stomach cramps and a spreading puddle of blood surrounding her, staining the sheets crimson. She was devastated, but vowed to herself to not let the loss of this child end her family dreams.

That promise was compromised a year and a half later when she miscarried for a second time, four months into the pregnancy. She had worried that there was something wrong with her, and had began to give up hope, as did her husband. Night after night, she would cry herself to sleep, wishing with all her heart that she could have a baby, a beautiful little son or daughter, to hold in her arms. She wanted nothing more, and began taking steps to become pregnant again. She ate all the right foods, did not drink any alcohol and took daily vitamins, and, after another desolate year, she finally fell pregnant for the third time. She and her husband had held their breaths throughout that first trimester and by the time the end of the second trimester drew near, they finally accepted hope and allowed themselves to be excited for the impending birth of their first child: a daughter.

And now here she was, at the beginning of her final trimester of the pregnancy. Except she was no longer pregnant. At just twenty six weeks, she had gone into labour: fourteen weeks prematurely. She had been lying in a hospital bed after the long and painful delivery, hoping and praying her baby girl was all right, when the doctor entered the room, his face solemn and grave. He told her how her baby was born prematurely: she knew this. He told her how her daughter was currently on oxygen and in a limited-contact incubator in the neonatal intensive care unit, and would remain there for months to come. Some of the words he used she did not understand, but she didn’t need to: she knew what was happening.

Individual, disconnected words and phrases were drifting around her head as she remembered the doctor’s sombre speech: ‘fourteen weeks premature’, ‘incubated indefinitely’, ‘permanent oxygen’, ‘up to six months in intensive care’.

Six months. That was half a year of her daughter’s precious life, spent in a cage being poked, prodded and watched twenty four hours a day, having needles stuck into her, constantly fighting for her life on a daily basis.

For the next six months, she had to face the fact that the daughter she had craved for so many years would be dependent not on her, but on the doctors and nurses helping her to survive.

She had to live with the agonising thought that her daughter’s health could be compromised for the rest of her life, and the thought that was in the front of her mind was burning a hole in her brain and driving a knife through her heart.

This is all my fault.