Today my son turns five
.Five candles. Five years. Five trips around the sun since a nurse looked at my blood pressure monitor and said the words that split my life into before and after.
I wrote most of this story six months ago and never hit publish. Reading it back today, on his actual birthday, felt like the right kind of ache to sit in. So here it is. Slighly cleaned up, still just as raw.
Let’s go back to July of 2021….
30 Weeks Pregnant: When Preeclampsia Symptoms Show Up Fast
I woke up looking like I’d had an allergic reaction to a bee sting. My whole face was swollen. My fingers and ankles were unrecognizeable.
My intuition was screaming: check your blood pressure. So Drew (my husband) jetted off to Target to buy one of those an arm cuff things.
The numbers came back in dangerous territory.
We called my OB. “Get to the hospital immediately.”
I remember standing in my messy kitchen in what felt like slow motion, looking around, knowing full well I wasn’t coming home that night.
“Do you have a living will?”
At the hospital they wrapped monitors around my belly and within a few hours told me my body was moving into preeclampsia, my blood pressure climbing to a level that put both me and the baby at risk.
A nurse leaned in just as my numbers spiked and asked, “Do you have a living will?”
She handed me paperwork. I was still trying to process the question when they put me in a wheelchair.
The plan: a magnesium drip, to slow the preeclampsia down and buy the baby more time in the uterus. At 30 weeks, he was still very premature.
If you’ve been on the mag drip, you know the particular kind of awful it is.
My body went limp. Waves of sickness rolled through me. All I could do was close my eyes and hand the moment over to something bigger than me.
Day 5: Preeclampsia Symptoms Get Worse
Trauma has a way of blurring the timeline, so forgive me if the days bleed together here. There was another round of magnesium. Shots to help the baby’s lungs, just in case. Conversations with NICU nurses about what might be coming.
By day five I had chest pain. An EKG came back normal. It was 5am and something still felt wrong.
A young nurse came in, quick and cold, no pleasantries, just checking boxes.
Minutes later I was surrounded by nurses and a doctor, my heart rate audible in the background, and someone said the sentence that still lives in my body:
“Seana, we need to deliver your baby or you’re at risk of having a stroke.”
My legs started shaking. My eyes found Drew. The room moved in slow motion while my brain screamed he’s too small, slow down, let me make this decision — and my own OB wasn’t even there. She was on vacation. I didn’t know a single person in that room.
The Operating Room
They wheeled me down the hall. Epidural went in. I didn’t feel a thing, or maybe I’d already checked out of my body.
Drew sat by my head. My arms were strapped down in a T. And while the doctors performed my c-section, they chatted about “a new grocery store that had opened in the south metro and great produce selection!”
Then, behind the plastic sheet, I heard him cry.
Relief. He could breathe.
“He’s 2 pounds and 10 ounces,” someone said.
They asked his name. Drew and I had two picked out, depending on his hair. Blonde meant Xavier. Dark meant Damian.
He had dark brown hair.
He was Damian.
I saw him for a second, and then he was gone, whisked into an isolette and wheeled to the NICU.
Two Floors Apart
I was in recovery while a nurse extracted colostrum from my breasts, drop by drop, and handed vials off to another nurse who carried them two floors up to my son.
That nurse was a gift. Compassionate, funny, exactly what two shell shocked new parents needed after the morning we’d just had. Thank you, God, for putting her in that room with us.
Eventually they wheeled my bed down to the NICU so we could touch Damian’s fingers and toes through the isolette. We couldn’t hold him yet. He needed to stay protected while he grew and healed.
He was so small you could see the outline of his skeleton, his heart beating under paper thin skin. And somehow, being near him, I just knew. I knew in every cell that he was going to be okay. He was strong. He simply wanted to arrive early (which tracks, honestly, my Cancer son with his Leo rising, just like his mother. I’ve got a lot to teach that kid about intuition and courage).
I also felt something I didn’t have language for yet, my breasts tingling and my uterus contracting just from being near him. A NICU nurse explained it to me later: the unseen, primal thread between a mother and her baby.
Isn’t it wild how much happens in the world we can’t see?
Alone in a Hospital Room
That evening, once I was settled and Damian was stable, Drew drove home for a few minutes to see our family, who had gathered there, unsure what else to do (this was still 2021, so nobody was allowed in the hospital).
Five minutes after he left, something cracked open in me.
I realized I was completely alone for the first time since this all started.
Everything up to that point had been rushed and frantic and full of other people’s hands on me.
Now there was just silence, and a trap door underneath me that I didn’t know was there.
A fiery, primal rage tangled up with panic and fear. I just wanted to be near my baby.
The same nurse who’d been collecting my colostrum walked back in right as the wave hit. “I’m having a really hard time,” I told her, crying.
She pulled up a chair and stayed for over an hour.
She told me what my hormones were about to do. She told me pumping would help regulate things. She told me story after story of tiny babies who thrived. An angel, plain and simple. I never saw her again after that day.
63 NICU Days
Sixty three days. A five pound baby. And then we were cleared to go home.
Scary moments. Happy moments. Genuinely terrible hospital food (why is that always true?). Nurses who felt like family. One nurse who ripped my c-section tape off without warning and told me I was “the reason” we’d had an early baby. A sick nurse in the NICU we had removed from Damian’s room. Mastitis, three separate times. A $1.2 million hospital bill (insert your own “thank God for insurance” joke here).
We drove between the NICU and our house so many times that we started accidentally hitting our garage door opener at the hospital parking gate.
Hospitals swallow your sense of time. Staff walked in with iced lattes at 9pm like it was any other morning. We lost that whole summer, the slow, sun soaked pregnancy summer I thought I was getting. And still, looking back, I wouldn’t trade it. The worst chapters have a way of showing you who you actually are.
Postpartum Depression After the NICU: Who Am I Now?
Drew worked remotely through all of it, thank God.
I wrapped up my coaching clients and quietly stepped away from my business.
I sat in the rocking chair next to Damian’s isolette asking myself the questions that don’t have quick answers: What’s next for all of us? Who am I now? Why did my body fail me? Am I... depressed?
When we finally brought him home, the real work started, the long nights, the milk that wouldn’t come no matter how hard I pumped, feeling shattered and hiding every piece of it from my husband. The tape on loop in my head:
I just want to feel like myself.
I’m not good at being a mom.
I’m failing at the one thing I’m supposed to know how to do.
And then, when I stopped pumping completely, a darker thought showed up: maybe they’d be better off without me. I saw flashes of stepping in front of moving cars, thinking it might bring relief.
That one scared me enough to know I needed help.
What I didn’t know then, and wish someone had told me: the moment you stop breastfeeding or pumping, your estrogen and progesterone can drop 50 to 90 % within DAYS. That’s the steepest hormone cliff you’ll experience outside of menopause. It can trigger a mood crash or full blown postpartum depression almost overnight.
Which is exactly what happened to me.
Getting My Footing Back
Some days I felt capable and proud of what I was building. Other days felt endless, like I wanted to disappear, like I was the reason our marriage was cracking.
“What is wrong with me?” I kept asking Drew.
I started virtual therapy (a genuine godsend, no childcare needed, I could log on during nap time and cry it out from my living room), tried EMDR, walked every single day, sometimes more than once, cleaned up my nutrition, sat with five minutes of guided meditation, and journaled while Damian slept, yoga, you name it. Slowly I chipped away at what my therapist called the Big T Trauma (shoutout to anyone else who geeks out on IFS).
I leaned hard on those tools. I never went on anti anxiety medication, though looking back, I should have considered it. Which now im on Prozac (my next Substack post)
What I’d Tell That Version of Me
If I could sit across from myself five years ago, here’s what I’d say:
The tighter you cling to your old identity, the harder motherhood is going to feel.
It really is mostly hormonal. Don’t believe every emotion that shows up, most of it is temporary.
Your soul’s purpose is hiding inside this hard season. Just wait and see how good it’s about to get.
Five Years Later
So here I am, five years after that morning in the kitchen, watching my kid blow out five candles instead of sitting in an isolette.
He’s loud and hilarious and absolutely nothing like the fragile little bird I met behind a plastic sheet. Every year on his birthday I feel this same strange cocktail: healed, proud, a little undone, and endlessly grateful.
The version of me who wrote this story wasn’t sure yet what came after the SAHM years. I still don’t fully know. But I know this chapter closes today with him turning five, healthy, wild, ours, and that feels like its own kind of miracle worth writing down.
Here’s the part I haven’t told you yet….
Somewhere in that EMDR, walking, journaling era I mentioned above, there was contemplation over a a tiny white pill. The lowest dose you can get. I swore for months I’d never need it, that I could white knuckle my way through the Big T Trauma with breathwork and sheer will alone.
I was wrong.
And what happened after I finally said yes to it is honestly the wildest part of this whole story, the PTSD, the PPD, all of it, starting to loosen its grip in a way therapy alone hadn’t been able to do.
That one’s coming next. Grab your tea for this one, it’s a lot…
Happy birthday, Damian. You were 2 pounds 10 ounces of pure stubborn will, and you have been teaching me ever since.
Were you there for the fear of blushing post, or is this your first time here? Comment below and tell me, OG or new? ILYSM.