The first time you can see your baby is heart stopping, but not the 'amazing' kind of heart stopping moment you had dreamed of.
You get introduced to so many people, but you will be so numb that you hardly remember your own name, let alone any of theirs. A nurse will walk towards you and tell you they are caring for your baby. This will be your first kick to the guts – someone else looking after YOUR baby. They will tell you what's happening; what all the tubes, needles, monitors, lines, and beeps are. But none of it will register, and you will forever keep asking what things are for.
You will miss all your baby's first moments while you lie in your hospital bed, wondering what's happening to them. You'll remember reading that skin-to-skin contact immediately following birth is so crucial for your baby, but there are literal walls between you, and you can't help but picture the worst.
Eventually, you will get to go home … without your baby. You will still be feeling the immense pain from the birth. You will still be getting up in the middle of the night to pump. You will see all the things you bought for your baby to come home to – but your baby won't be there.
You will suddenly notice just how many babies there are in the world. You will see them in every shopping centre, coffee shop, hospital corridor and on every TV channel. You will also see all the pregnant women, ready to burst at the seams, clearly carrying their baby to full term. The hardest sight will be seeing those happy parents with their baby strapped tightly into its capsule, ready to be taken home. You will see the fear in their eyes, the 'What if I stuff this up?' And quietly, you'll find yourself thinking, 'You don’t know what fear is'.
You will mourn the pregnancy you didn’t get to have. You’ll miss the kicking and rolling inside you, the talking to your belly, the father of your baby talking to and stroking your bump with the softest touch.
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(L) Levi in hospital; (R) Levi with dad Rodney at the Great Humpty Ball, Darwin
You will cry every day at the thought that you didn't do enough or that you did something wrong. You will even find yourself apologising for not being able to keep your baby safe by hanging on longer.
You will soon learn a whole new range of words and understand medical terminology and abbreviations like you have studied Pre-Med. You will know what incubate, extubate, aspirate and ventilate mean - though you’ll really wish you didn’t. You will hear terms like 'critically ill, extremely low birth weight, high risk, underdeveloped'. You will wish you could trade places, so your little baby didn't have to go through all of this.
You will forever check that you have your phone on you. You will look at it a thousand times a day to make sure you didn't miss a call, wondering if it's ringing while you're in the shower. And when it does ring, your heart will stop.
People will constantly tell you to 'Take care of you, too', but you will forget how to. You will forget to eat, you won't sleep, and you will forget what you used to enjoy doing before your world crumbled from under your feet.
Your protective instincts will kick in fierce, and you'll wonder how your heart has held together. It has never felt so full and so broken all at the same time.
But do you want to know something else?
The small things that used to bother you won't anymore. Life gets put into perspective, and all your trips, failures and the things you didn't get to do will fade into the distance and become insignificant.
You see your child fight for every breath, defy the odds or, in our case, stick his two middle fingers up at the statistics that say he won't make it. We already see him saying, 'Watch this, mummy and daddy!'
Some days it feels like our baby can't fight anymore – he's been fighting for so long already. It's heartbreaking and breathtaking, and it will show you that life is a battle. But so what? We've got this … And so does Levi.
By Tegan Wain
Levi Atkinson with mum Tegan and dad Rodney at the Great Humpty Ball, Darwin, 2023
Levi's battle and the medical interventions that helped him fight:
Levi came into this world at just 24 weeks and four days, weighing a tiny 740 grams. With extreme Chronic Neonatal Lung Disease (CNLD), severe abdominal infections, two small intestine perforations, a hole in the heart and blood clots in the brain and upper left leg, the odds were stacked against him. However, thanks to several pieces of equipment donated to Royal Darwin Hospital’s NICU by the Humpty Dumpty Foundation and supporters, Levi continues to fight for his life and is going from strength to strength.
A Giraffe Omnibed Carestation has given Levi uninterrupted warmth and protection while receiving lifesaving treatment from care teams, and a Neonatal Ventilator has helped support his little lungs.
At one month old (and weighing just 1 kg), Levi was also transported from Darwin to Brisbane for further treatment in a Neonatal Transport Cot – a feat that wouldn’t have been possible without this equipment, which provides critically ill newborns with safe and consistent support during transportation.
Meanwhile, mum Tegan has utilised a Symphony Breast Pump to help express extra milk for baby Levi to ensure he gets the nutrients required as a premature baby to heal and grow.
The latest is that little Levi is now off oxygen support during the day and doing well.