Description:
Nobody plans for the NICU. And yet every year in the United States alone, nearly four hundred thousand babies -- roughly one in ten -- spend time in the neonatal intensive care unit. These are the babies born too early, or the babies with conditions that require more than the well-baby nursery can offer, or the babies whose birth was accompanied by an alarm that moved everyone very quickly in a direction the parents did not expect.
Hold On Tight: The Complete NICU Parent Survival Guide is the book that has been missing from the NICU experience -- the comprehensive, practical, emotionally honest guide that takes parents from the first overwhelming moments in the unit through discharge and into the world beyond.
This book covers everything a NICU parent needs to know and most parents are never told: the NICU layout, staff hierarchy, and levels of care; what the equipment does and what the monitors mean; the NICU terminology that nobody taught you; the full feeding journey from TPN to breastfeeding; how to be a real member of your baby's care team; kangaroo care and how to ask for it; the logistics of parking, pumping schedules, sibling care, work leave, and the financial realities of a prolonged hospitalization; your emotional survival and the specific grief of the NICU parent; the relationship under pressure and the village you will need; the long-haul NICU when weeks become months; going home with or without a monitor; NICU follow-up care and early intervention; and what happens when things do not go the way you hoped.
Through the stories of five composite NICU families -- a twenty-eight-weeker's mother, twins' mother, a cardiac baby's father, a thirty-four-weeker who stayed far longer than expected, and the mother of a twenty-three-weeker -- this book makes visible the full range of what the NICU experience actually is: terrifying and tender, logistically overwhelming and surprisingly communal, permanently altering in ways that are both devastating and profound.
You did not plan to be here. You are here. This is the guide you needed and nobody gave you.