Over two months have passed. I would like to document more of the events that happened but I am just not ready to dive into them in detail. I would have to ask Bret questions because I am starting to realize that I have many holes in the sequence of events.
Ronin passed away on September 20th 2010 at 12:11pm our 2nd year wedding anniversary. We were there. The last hour of his life was so sad. I really can't think of any other words to describe it. I wasn't scared because it was eminent. I wasn't scared because in my heart I knew WE would one day be ok. One day. No one should ever have to go through the last hour of their baby's life like we did. He will be apart of our lives' forever.
When we woke up that day I spoke to the nurse and she reported that the Doctor on call wanted to talk to us. I had that sinking feeling and knew that was not a good sign. We hurried to the hospital and we confronted by a very sick little boy. Over night it was clear that something was not going well. His platelet count and hermatocrit (blood level) dropped or shall I say plummeted for a baby with less that a pint of blood running through his whole little body. The previous 17 days of his life the doctors had kept saying, "stop looking at the monitors and interpretting the numbers (which we had become very good at) keep looking at your baby. He will tell you". There isn't a truer statement. This time he WAS telling us he couldn't hold on any longer and Ronin he was dying. It was pretty clear to me. His coloring was off, his facial expression was miserable. He looked sick.
We had our meeting with the Dr. Buxton. She discussed her thoughts and what we could try but she made it clear that things didn't look very promising. I will spare you the details blah blah blah because nothing is very interesting. In fact, all I wanted to do was get back to the NICU where Ronin was and stop wasting the final minutes of his life.
Ronin waited for us to return before his arrhythmias began (erratic heart rate). His heart was jumping and falling which in my opinion sounds very painful and scary. If my heart did that and I was conscious of it I would be petrified. Was he conscious of it? Possibly? Maybe not? No one will ever be able to tell me if he was, and that fact makes my tears fall on the keyboard as I type.It makes me so mad that we live in a society where I can walk into a clinic with my ailing pet and they can end the suffering, but my baby boy had to endure it all.
His last hour of injections of calcium, changes on the ventilator and 2 finger CPR will forever be stained in my mind. His heart rate went from 160 to 120 to 60 back up and down several times until it finally rested at 0.
We had the opportunity to hold him ONLY after he died. Part of my is sad because I would have liked to have felt life inside of him aside from the electrical pulses of death. The other part of me is happy I didn't because I probably would have blamed myself for moving him if things went bad right after.
Bret and I held each other so tight. Seeing him hold his dead son tortures me. I try not to think of it often but when I do I really lose it. I like to lose it alone. We went home and just cried together and held each other. Our stress of going back and forth to the NICU was over but we missed it.
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