1 week

It's been one week since we said good bye to our little angel. It's not easy realizing that I will never hold her again or see her little face, but it is comforting to know that she isn't in pain anymore or having to endure transfusion after transfusion.

I don't think I ever really gave the explicit details as to why we choose to let her go, so just to clear any gray area here it is:

She got the infection on a Monday, which grew incredibly fast during the culture. The fact that it grew so fast was a horrible sign that it was a strong end fierce infection. They immediately put her on antibiotics and tried everything they could to help her fight it. They elevated her so she was laying at a slant to help keep fluids from accumulating in her lungs. Kaitlin also from the beginning had a platelet problem. She couldn't keep her levels at a normal rate so they were constantly giving her platelets, which platelets are important since they are the part of your blood that clots when you get a cut...she had many openings in her body that weren't natural from her surgeries and other various things that they needed to do to her (like her g-tube and the tube they put in her tummy on that Sunday to vent out the excess air, etc). When a preemie receives so many fluids it raises the risk of their tiny vessels rupturing, so they keep a close eye on their brain since that is the most vulnerable. They did a scan of Kaitlin's brain on Wednesday and our doctor called in the expert to relook at it on Thursday. What they found was Grade 3 bleeding (pretty serious) and because our little one had the platelet problem they anticipated that it would only get worse and worse, which would cause lots of brain damage (pressure on your brain is never a good thing and the blood had no where to go). We could have opted at that point in time to wait out the infection (that is IF she ever would have gotten over the infection) and hoped for the best, which would be that she might have some sort of consciousness without probably ever being able to walk, etc. That would have been the tiniest, itsy bitsy chance of the best case scenario...really we were looking at her organs failing (which her liver had already started) and she would have instead had a slow painful death. The fact that she also started having seizures that Wednesday night was just another sign that things were sliding downhill and wouldn't come back up (since it's another sign of things failing her).

So we grimly made the decision to let her pass peacefully in our arms that Thursday, in the NICU surrounded by all the beeps and whirs that she was accustomed to. It wasn't easy and it will never be easy to remember, but it was the best choice to make for our little one...and beside isn't that what all parents try to do? make the best decisions for their children? So even though I don't have a baby girl to cuddle with, I'm still a mommy...and some will say that I always have been :)