nightmare

Warning: this is pretty graphic in places. Just don't read it if you're PTSDish or have any kind of sensitivity regarding c sections. Don't read it if you're squeamish or grossed out by blood.

This is how I slept last night. I just want to write it down, as an experiment really, to see if writing down my nightmares makes them less real. Makes them go away. Makes it so that when I lie down at night I'm not picking up where I left off.

Skittle had been in NICU for seven months and the girl in the bed in front of us had had her baby in there for a year. Time was long, there was nothing we could do to make it speed up. The girl in front of us had long, blonde, wavy, frizzy hair, like she'd worn it in plaits when wet and let them out once it had dried. Me and hubs were sat either side of Skittle with his CPAP face and the NICU room span with activity and medical mayhem. All around me, on every side there were things going on that I didn't understand or didn't want to see, I wanted to be alone with my baby but instead I was in the middle of a ward that resembled a spinning top. A spinning top with no walls, a room with no boundaries.

I ran away so many times. Up a long drive way to the side of this imaginary hospital. Sometimes hubs would come after me, sometimes I would meet the blonde lady. She wouldn't talk to me because her baby had been in there longer and she said our situation didn't count.

The insane scene just got more harrowing, NICU was also theatre and was also recovery. Next to us a woman was about to have her c section, her stomach was cut open from her rib cage to her groin and blood and muscle and tissue was exposed but they couldn't get the baby out safely. She screamed and tried to roll over and her husband tried to stop her. I cowered behind Skittle's incubator and tried to focus on him and nothing else, but it was too late. I fainted, sliding underneath the table and waking up covered in blood.

In recovery there's screaming, despair and death. Confusion and tubes scattered everywhere.

Sweaty, cold and exhausted I drift back into consciousness and realise Skittle has not been in NICU for seven months, I have not run away, my scar only goes from my belly button to my groin and its not reopened. I am in bed, next to Skittle, I can feel hubs, everyone is breathing.

On goes the phone, it'll take me a while to block that out and get back to sleep.

I guess it's just PTSDishness that makes me dream like this. It's not every night, thank goodness. But it doesn't make for restful nights. One day I might sleep peacefully again, maybe around the time Skittle sleeps through the night...that could be good!