When my son was born three months early, weighing in at just over two pounds (915g to be exact), my husband and I were given a crash course in excellent hygiene…NICU style.
All babies are born with naïve, immature immune systems. Preemies are even more susceptible to germs as they come into the world far less developed than their giant newborn counterparts. My son had to learn how to breathe, which took him nearly three months to figure out, so fighting viruses was not very high on his list of physical skill sets.
As the parents of a skinny, doll-like infant hooked up to IV lines, monitors, and a ventilator, the risks of an illness are terrifying. Quite simply, if you get a tiny sniffle, you don’t get to visit your baby. The stakes of staying healthy in those first few months of motherhood were HUGE!
Each morning I would wake up, invariably with a jolt of panic, and take a tentative big sniff. No congestion – phew. Then I’d carefully swallow and focus in on every sensation in my throat. No scratchiness, no swelling – yay! Then it was time to put on one of two dresses that I wore that were the best for “kangaroo cuddles” and head off to the hospital to see my boy.
But I learned a LOT about next-level hygiene, which now feels quite habitual six years on in a pandemic, and, for that, I’m grateful. Here are the highlights.
Hygiene à la NICU:
- Arriving at the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) meant taking off all jewellery, as dirt and germs can hide in the intricacies of jewels and it’s hard to clean adequately underneath a ring. For my husband and I that meant that we went months without wearing our wedding rings (or any rings), while for visitors it meant that they simply had to remove them and tuck them away somewhere safe while inside the NICU walls.
- Scrub hands from under the fingernails all the way up to the elbows (just like on Grey’s Anatomy) before entering the NICU.
- No touching anything you don’t need to touch. Doors were automatic, and, to this day, when I enter/exit a store or café that has a wheelchair accessible door opening button I always use it…by pressing it with the back of my wrist.
- Only the soles of shoes should make contact with the floor. Early on, I put my bag on the floor and a nurse quickly picked it up, disinfected the bottom of it with a wipe, and placed it on a countertop with a comment to me about floors being dirty. If anything fell to the ground (a clean diaper, a tiny onesie) it was automatically relegated to the garbage can or the laundry. No five second rule when there are tiny lives at stake!
- Hand sanitizer before and after all contact with babies. The nurses were amazing. Monitors going off left, right and centre (we called the NICU ward ‘the casino’ because of the incessant dinging and pinging), but still they would quickly sanitize their hands, reach into the incubator to adjust whatever needed adjusting to quiet the monitor, then re-sanitize before getting back to whatever they were doing before the alarm. It was automatic.
It’s a scary time right now and I admit that at times I feel exhausted and overwhelmed by it all. But I have hope that this is a global lesson in stepping up our awareness of germ transmission.
When we reach the other side of Covid-19 – and we will – I hope that we will be in a culture where it’s a-ok to stay home when sick, either to work remotely, if able, or to genuinely convalesce and return to health. I hope that we will have a collective awareness of everything that we touch from minute to minute with increased diligence for maintaining the personal cleanliness of our hands minute to minute. And I hope that respiratory etiquette will be second nature to us all.
And I hope that we’ll savour hugs and handshakes with a new appreciation for the simple joy of kind human touch.
Happy Prematurity Awareness Month! And Happy belated World Prematurity Day !
