When I became pregnant with my son, Conor, it was a total surprise. We had been trying to get pregnant, but I had had two miscarriages and we decided to put things on hold. We needed a change I had lived in South Florida for ten years, my husband twenty-one. We got out the road atlas and picked Denver. After a few months of research, we decided that Denver was the perfect place for us. Clean air, lots to do, great job opportunities. That April, we flew to Denver and went to our job interviews. My husband, a respiratory therapist, got a lot of “maybes.” I had fifteen years of critical care and oncology experience and was offered a job on the spot. So we went apartment shopping and found a nice two bedroom apartment that we liked in Lakewood, a suburb of Denver.
The trip was fun, as we went up the Rockies, went to the Museum of Natural History and ate odd foods at The Fort, a restaurant that served elk and ostrich among other game. The ostrich did me in and I was sick for the rest of the trip. When we got home, my husband said to me one morning, “Geez, your boobs are huge!” He ran out to the closest drugstore and got a home pregnancy test that tested positive within seconds. No wonder I was sick. The next weekend, as we lay in bed, we both decided it was better to stay in Florida, where my in-laws lived, than move to a city where we knew no one. So, with a saddened heart, I called the nurse recruiter and told her we weren’t moving because I was pregnant.
The first few weeks at home were a nightmare. My mother-in-law decided to move in for “a few weeks” to help out. After two days, I had enough, and my husband politely asked his mom to leave. Conor, who was born at thirty-three weeks, like most preemies, developed jaundice and had to be on a “bili-bed” at home the first weeks. Every morning, the home health RNs would arrive to weigh him and draw blood from his tiny foot to check his bilirubin levels. He wouldn’t eat. I had to bottle feed because I needed to get back on my lupus medications. It took forty-five minutes to get him to take an ounce of formula. It seemed forever before he actually finished a bottle completely.
