Visionary art of Geenss Archenti Flores
By Emily Anne Utia
Now Emanuel is at my side and he is crying too, going back and forth between baby, looking at my abdomen wide open behind the curtain and me. I can hear my son. My heart is beating fast as I hear all the voices in Spanish talking fast and my mind is too much of a blurry mush to understand anything. Then there is a nurse with a tine bundle coming towards me and suddenly a warm, pink, wet check is against mine. “Tu hijo” she says. “Your son.” And then he is gone and it is the last time we will be together for almost 2 weeks.
This is where the real nightmare begins. Because of the inhalation of meconium and his low birth weight, William was whisked off to the NICU in the public hospital across the street while I was still being stitched up. The clinic that had done the C-section did not have a facility to care for newborns that needed intensive care. This meant William had to go to the public hospital across the street. So we went from home birth, to a fairly nice private clinic, to a public hospital in Cusco, Peru, all in the matter of a few hours.
This facility, the public hospital, was something out of a movie. Except that it wasn’t a movie, it became my real life. Released from the clinic two days later and barely able to walk, I went with my husband, who had been back and forth, to finally meet my son. In my mind, we were going to pick him up and go home. Entering the hospital, my husband guided me through the swarms of Cusqueños and up to the infant unit. It’s hard to really explain the conditions of this hospital, but cold, dirty, and dreary will have to do. In the infant unit was a tiny waiting room with one wooden bench and a giant flat screen TV blaring Latin soap operas, which is where I would spend countless hours among the other Cusqueño parents.
Thus started the next leg of our disastrous journey through the public health system of the Hospital Regional de Cusco. We were only allowed back to visit William at certain hours of the day for only a few moments and one at a time. The overseeing doctor was only available for consults at 11 am each day, unless he had something more important in which case there would be no information that day. The nurses wouldn’t talk to us unless they were giving an order or telling me I was doing something wrong. Every three hours I was called back into the lactation room with the other mamitas there to squeeze our breasts by hand into glass jars. There were no chairs, no heat, and pumps were not allowed.
Being the only white woman in this part of the hospital, I experienced a vast amount of prejudice. There was already a great disconnect between the elite doctors and the poor patients, but add in my white skin and there was a general attitude of complete ignorance towards me and Emanuel, who is a native Peruvian. It was like pulling teeth to get information about what was happening with our son, if he was improving, and how long he would be there. It was a complete nightmare.
Ultimately, what I’ve pieced together is that William’s initial admittance to the NICU was due to low birth weight and the lung infection from inhaling the meconium. He had needed to be on breath support, but quickly overcame this issue and stabilized enough to be off any additional support pretty quickly. The issue that kept him inside his plastic box hooked up to tubes and such was that he was not digesting the milk they were feeding him. This is a huge area of frustration for me and is still difficult to write about.
First of all, had they allowed me to hold William right away and attempt a breast-feeding, we most likely could have avoided all the problems that followed. Unfortunately, because of the issue with his lungs, this was not possible. However, had I been allowed to hold him, tubes and all, and put him against my skin, his life-force energy would have kicked on and he most likely would have started making gains much faster. This point is proven later on.
Also, if when they were attempting their feedings, they properly offered my tiny bits of colostrum I was painstakingly sucking out of my breasts with a syringe in the room next door, I believe he also would have had a better chance of developing his digestion system more easily. Not to mention actually holding him in human arms and not just sticking a tube through the box and down his throat. The first feedings were either another woman’s more deviled milk or formula, as I was not able to produce anything they could even use for the first three days and even when I did start collecting the tiny bits of colostrum I am positive they didn’t use it.
I am not a doctor, but I am a mother. The protocol they were following makes absolutely no sense to me and, I believe, is what made the problem in the first place. The depth of rage that I felt and had to manage on a daily and moment-to-moment level was enough to make me feel crazy. I hated getting up each morning, still hardly able to walk yet making the journey each day from our rented rooms to the hospital, hunched over, bearing the cold and sitting on the hard wooden bench all day, waiting to be called back to stand in the cold room and squeeze my sore nipples until drops of milk landed in their jars, my contracting uterus sensing shots of pain through my already aching womb. How did I get here? One moment I was creating my birth altar in the cozy next of the home we had put so much effort into preparing and the next I was in this absolute nightmare that there was no stopping.
Days were going by. All I could do was stay present. If I allowed my mind to wander, toward the past and what happened or the future and what was going to happen, I would surely lose it. It took every ounce of anything I had left within me to muster the energy to face my reality every day. My tiny little son, barely making it in that box and living off an IV for survival. I was so scared. So very scared and if for one moment, I gave into that fear I would crumble, which I had to do a couple of times. I was even more scared of the crumbing because I didn’t know how I would pull myself back together to be able to go and see that precious little face in there, counting on me to fight for him.
It was the prayers that kept me going. By this point, one week later, my parents had arrived from the States and I had a huge network of support around me from their community in New York to my friends and family that spread through the West Coast and out to Hawaii. The word was out and even though I didn’t dare even look at my phone and the thought of Facebook nauseated me, the web of love and prayer that was created around us was astonishing. My parents were complete angels, getting us out of the crappy hotel where we had been staying and into a decent apartment within walking distance of the hospital. My mom began cooking for us and I swear I think it was the first time Emanuel and I ate since we left the clinic, where I had been letting Emanuel eat the meals they were bringing me. They were completely at our beck and call for anything we needed, most of all they were a shoulder for me to cry on, and arms to collapse into. I hadn’t done this with Emanuel, I think because we were just in robot mode, going through the motions of each day and doing our best to hold each other up.
When I did allow myself to collapse into my moms arms, crying deep from my womb, it was the prayer of all of our family and friends, even people who didn’t know me personally that had found out what was going on, that wrapped around me and lifted me up to keep going. I could literally feel the moment that I would be drowning in my despair without any idea of how to make my way out and then there would be this warmth that would wrap around me like a blanket and literally lift me up again, to put the pieces back together and to make that walk back to the hospital, to sit on that hard bench facing the blaring soap operas, surrounded by the other Cusqueño parents eyeing me with both judgment and compassion, as we were all in this one together.
On day 10, the thing hit rock bottom. We had somehow gotten into enough of a routine of the back and forth to the hospital, settling into a rhythm of how to get on the best sides of the right doctors and nurses and to be there at the best times to see William while juggling eating and sleeping. Every day, there was a different doctor on call to be overseeing the infant unit and it was a juggling act to get direct information about our prognosis. One day the doctor said he had been digesting some milk and he looked good and the next day it was back to no milk is passing and he is on gastrointestinal rest. Finally, on this day, after receiving a relatively inspiring report the day before, the doctor on duty announced to us they wanted to do surgery.
This was shocking. One day our little baby is finally making improvements and the next they want to do open abdominal surgery to correct whatever is causing the digestive issue.
We were beside ourselves.
To be continued and concluded, next full moon…
Emily Anne Utia
In addition to being a new mama, Emily Anne Utia is a natural wellness practitioner dedicated to holistic healing arts which span different cultures. For the past ten years, she has been studying native healing practices from North America including Hawaii, as well as the Peruvian Amazon and high mountains of Columbia. Emily works alongside her husband, Emanuel, native to the Amazon jungle, and together they study, educate, and offer traditional treatments utilizing the vegetalista tradition of plant medicine. Together, they created Machimpuro, Centro para Plantas Naturales, a small and rustic center located in the depths of the Peruvian Jungle. In addition, Emily has her own U.S. based healing practice called Wahine de La Selva. Before dedicating her life to natural wellness, Emily worked as a professional child and family therapist in the field of speech and language pathology. Her own story of how she overcame depression, anxiety, and addiction is shared through her book, Awaken, a 21st Century Manifesto, which can be found on amazon.com.