I have a little bit of a pet peeve recently. It normally goes like that:
Friend (Most often someone I had just met): Oh I heard that Fighter is a premature baby!
Me: Yeah…
Friend: Ohh my son was prematurely born too.
Me: Oh really? How early was he?
Friend; 36 weeks.
Me: *slaps forehead*
This actually happens to me quite a bit. Yes I know these people really don’t mean any harm but it’s just become a little bit of my pet peeve. Why? Yes 36 weeks is below the full term of 40 weeks but a baby born at 36 weeks isn’t really in any danger caused by being born too early. When Shorty found out about her preeclampsia she was 28 weeks and we were told the baby could come any time then. We were scared and seriously worried about Fighter so much that we started Googling about what are the chances of survival for a baby at 28 weeks and what we had to prepare ourselves for.
Our Doctor on the other hand told us that she would try to help us get Fighter to 34 weeks. At 34 weeks the baby will be premature but big enough to have low risk of any future problems. We didn’t make it to 34 weeks of course. Fighter was born at 31 weeks at only 1.1KG, being the tiniest baby I had ever seen. And there are babies who had to fight harder fights. I’m in this preemie group on Facebook where I see babies born as early as 25 weeks.
Let me tell you how it’s like to have a prematurely born baby:
1) The baby has to be put in an incubator because he can’t regulate his own body temperature yet.
2) The baby has to have a ventilator or a CPAP (some sort of mask) to help him breathe because his lungs are still immature.
3) The baby runs a risk of a lot of problems. The parents have to go through the agony of waiting for one by one of his test results to come out and make sure he passes them. A premature baby can have eyesight problems, bleeding in the brain, lungs collapsing, digestive system problems and more. It is a very stressful time where you know all you can do is pray.
Most heartbreaking of all is that you don’t get to hold your newborn baby in your arms with a wrapped up swaddle. You can only get to look at him through a glass incubator while he has tubes all over him.
That is what it’s like having a premature baby, an experience most 36 weeker babies don’t have to go through. So really when a parent of a 36 weeker “premature” baby tells a 25-32 weeker parent that she had a premature baby, it’s like a receptionist at a law firm telling a Cambodian refugee during Pol Pot’s era that life is tough.
Yes I know that nobody means any harm… so it’s not like I hate it when anyone does that to us. It’s really just like a little pet peeve.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space