Claire Marie Hansen

Where to begin....
January 12, 2013 was the glorious Saturday morning we welcomed #5 into our family.  She is beautiful  She was born in the early morning hours, typical of all of our children.  She has brought a sense of peace and harmony into our family that we have really lacked, but didn't know was missing.  We love our little Claire Bear very much. 

She is beautiful and tiny and perfect. 

At 2 weeks old she started getting a cold.  It quickly became obvious she was having a rough little congestion and wasn't breathing well.  We took her in for her 2 week check up and they told us all the normal stuff to watch for, ribs showing when she took breaths, etc. They were concerned about her weight gain a little at this point.  She was still not back to birth weight so the dr. suggested I add fomula in for extra calories.  This was Friday.  By Monday she was super stuffed and pretty lethargic.  We went to the Dr again.  Lungs sounded clear and she was ok. 

That night things were not ok.  She was not eating well.  She barely took a bottle and would not even try to nurse.  She spent the whole night on my chest wheezing.  Early that morning I tried to feed her a bottle with no response at all.  I changed her diaper.  Nothing.  I put a wet wash cloth on her and she barely gasped for air. Ryan was ready to call 911 but I grabbed her and ran to the car, racing to hospital.  I knew I could get there quicker.  We only live about a mile away and it's a pretty straight shot through the neighborhood without to much traffic or to many stop signs.

In the emergency room they immediately started CPR on her and eventually got her hooked up to oxygen.  It was a blur of nurses and doctors for about 45 minutes.  It wasn't until they had her back to breathing better and all hooked up and "pink" again that I realized just how close to death she had come.  She was an ashen gray color and had become severely dehydrated.  Later when Ry and I talked more about it, he felt his mom was there literally screaming in  his ear to get her taken care of NOW!!

This was on Tuesday, January 27, 2013.  By the end of the day she had been admitted to the PICU and had a chest tube breathing for her.  Diagnosis: Apnea caused by RSV.  In layman's terms, her brain was forgetting to breath.  Normally RSV causes serious breathing problems...it's the babies Pneumonia.  If an adult gets it, it doesn't do much damage, but in babies it is deadly.  The smaller they are the worse it can be and because she was only two weeks old it caused the apnea.

Back to the PICU.  This department had been open for 8 days when Claire got sick.  8 days.  Otherwise we would have found ourselves on an airplane headed to SLC to Primary Children's Hospital.  Not a helicopter...we are too far away.  I spent the week in the PICU with her and came to love her nurses.  I still light up inside with gratitude if ever I run into any of them around town, which happens every so often.  They had a little chair/ bed for me.  They brought me meals.  They helped me pump and store my breast milk so we could use it when she was ready.  They offered me showers and any other comfort they could think of.  At one point I was home taking care of things for a couple hours when the mail came.  In it was a postcard from the hospital announcing the opening of the Brand New PICU department at the hospital.  I started laughing so hard it became the crazy lady laugh.  And then I cried.

I cried a lot that first day. I couldn't stop. I'm pretty sure they thought I was going to have a mental breakdown.    Various people kept trying to ask me how I was doing.  People from the ward who worked in the hospital kept stopping by.    Eventually my mama made it to Idaho Falls and that helped.  We sat and cried together.  I'm crying right now trying to write this all down.

By Friday she kept waking up and was breathing over the ventilator.  They removed her breathing tube on Saturday and it was the first time I was able to hold her since she was admitted.

Written sometime in February 2013...

This day is when I stopped writing my blog.  I am lucky and blessed that my child did not die.  But going through something so traumatic changed me.  Every time I sat down to try to finish this post I would break down all over again.  PTSD is real.  Here is is 9 1/2 years later and I still am tearing up a bit trying to finally post about Claire's hospital stay.  

A lot of life has happened and I miss this journal of mine.  I never really wrote this for anyone but me to begin with and I always wanted to get back to it at some point.  I guess  now is that time.