Important tips for medical personnel in dealing with grieving parents

Not the most creative name is it? But it gets the point across. Here is the pamphlet I made for my hospital presentation. This project has brought me great peace in Genevive's death. I guess I feel like it isn't all for nothing. I got awesome responses from hospital personnel. And I have to say personally I am very proud of it!! Here is a PDF file for anyone who wants to See my pamphlet.

Important tips for medical personnel in dealing with grieving parents

Of course feel free to save, print, share whatever you want with it. It is my hope that this will be distributed to hospitals that deal with early infant death.

I plan to make a website to publish it on soon. And eventually get some nice copies of it printed to mail out to some more hospitals. Local hospitals in my area already have copies of it.

And Please I am always looking for feedback and suggestions.

Women and Infants

I love my hospital, I had my son there and of course I had my twins there. I watched them nurse Lillian to health and of course I lost Genevive there.

I never realized what an amazing place Women and infants was until that happened. They were wonderful at coaching us when Genevive passed away. And amazing at putting up with us the rest of Lillian's NICU stay. Because I sure was a paranoid difficult Mom. I am not sure what happened, we lost her and a switch in my head flicked. Now I knew a baby could die and my entire approach was different in the NICU. I wanted to be hands on, I wanted to take every opportunity I could to do anything and everything, because you never know. In an instant Lily could have died too.

I felt the hospital was very accommodating to this need. And also went out of their way in other aspects too. The heading doctor on the team came and talked to me every morning when I came in, just to let me know Lily was doing fantastic. We only ever saw them before when there was a big issue. We still see her to this day at the followup clinic. I also got a lot more reassurance from the nurse practitioners as well. Lillian's primary nurse just seemed to understand me, we fit together very well. She let me be hands on and walked me through stuff, instead of just doing it herself, which certainly would have been faster. Anyhow I am rambling.

The point of this post is I am excited I go to volunteer services today!! Now I already did a presentation at the hospital. I spoke about our experience and presented my pamphlet. That got such an awesome response. I was invited to be on a new committee that was forming on palliative (end of life) care in the NICU. I really enjoy being on the committee, it is my way of healing from Genevive's death. Through my experience I can help other parents who find themselves in our situation.

We are also planning to have me do my presentation again sometime in the fall, but 6 times in a couple weeks period at different break times so that more hospital personnel can come. And I guess for this kind of presentation they get some sort of credit for going.

And we decided that since I am in and out a lot, and likely to do more. I need to go have my tb testing done and stuff like that and get a badge, woo! So when I walk in security won't look at me sideways.

Hey tomorrow I will post my pamphlet in case anyone here is interesting in reading it. Or even sending a copy to their local hospital *wink*

Isn't it funny

I always feel like I read all these clever bloggers and I am not clever at all. Everytime I want to say something important and make it sound important and poetic, I sit here staring at the screen like an idiot.
Anyways, I just wanted to say Happy mothers day to all the Angel moms out there. Some of you have other kids, some of you don't. But you are all mothers to the most special babies.

Feeling a little guilty.

I read a lot of other angel moms blogs. And belong to a couple of forums. And a lot of comments are made about visiting the cemetery. And a lot of photos are posted of the cemetery. I rarely visit Genevive's grave. I usually do on big milestones, like 6 months, 1 year, and christmas I did. And I did a couple days after she passed away. But I never leave the cemetery feeling peaceful, It never feels like it helps me.

When we went on the 6 month anniversary we redecorated the whole thing. I did find that to be helpful, and enjoyed myself. I do know a lot of it is was that I am very bothered by the headstone. But now we have one and it will be installed soon, I hope that helps me a bit.

In the back of my head though I wonder if that makes me a bad mom. Or I wonder of other people will think I don't care about her because I don't visit her every week. The thing is I feel closer to her by holding her little blood stained gown or rubbing her little hand imprint than I do looking at the mound of dirt.

P.S. That is a photo of Genevive's casket I took from the car window as we were leaving. I just really felt it was a beautiful sight. Her casket was just so lovely with the little cherubs on it. And the snow and the flowers all made it look so quiet and peaceful and represented how pure and innocent she was so well.